Hymn of the Universe

t>F THE-TJNiVEBSg-

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

HYMN

OF

THE

UNIVERSE

Perennial Library

Harper & Row, Publishers

New York, Evanston, San Francisco, London

-

PREFATORY LETTER

from H. M. Queen Marie-Jo$6

P&re Teilhard de Chardin,.a figure-head in the un-
folding of a new cycle in the life of mankind, moves
us profoundly not only by the amazing lucidity of
his scientific vision but also by his love, his im-
mense love, of God, which enabled him to see, ev-
erywhere throughout the created world, what the
majority of men are blind to: the constant presence
of the Creator. Pere Teilhard was far from being a
pantheist; but he saw God, the First Cause, present
everywhere, and, filled as he was with reverence for
the material world, he lived always in direct aware-
ness of the spiritual. The most convincing proof of
what some have called the "saintiiness of Plre Teil-
hard" is his humility; and his humility is the pledge
of the greatness of his love.

January 1961 mabie-jos6

CONTENTS

;. "

Translato/s Note

1

Introduction by N. M. Wildiers, s.t.d.

5

THE MASS ON THE WORLD

9

The Offering

11

Fire over the Earth

14

Fire in the Earth

16

Communion

22

Prayer

26

CHRIST IN THE WORLD OF MATTER

33

The Picture

36

The Monstrance

41

The Pyx

45

THE SPIRITUAL POWER OF MATTER

53

Hymn to Matter

65

PENSEES selected by Femande Tardivel

71

The Presence of God in the World

73

Humanity in Progress

92

The Meaning of Human Endeavor

115

In the Total Christ

137

Sources

162

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

In this book it is almost always P£re Teilhard the
man of prayer rather than the man of science who
speaks to us. As Sir Julian Huxley wrote of The
Mass on the World, it is a "truly poetical essay . . •
at one and the same time mystical and realistic, re-
ligious and philosophical." This does not mean, of
course, that the author ever forgets or betrays his
science; what it does mean is that the reader's
approach, and response, to these pages must of ne-
cessity be quite different from those demanded by
the scientific works. The mystic, the poet use lan-
guage in a way essentially different from that of the
scientist.

In his study of St John of the Cross in The De-
grees of Knowledge, M. Maritain defined this dif-
ference with clarity and exactitude in terms of the
contrast between the (poetical) language of the
mystic and the (scientific) language of the theolo-
gian, and pointed out the disastrous results of read-
ing the former as though it were the latter. The cum
of scientific language is to provide exactly defined
and unambiguous statements about reality; that of

2 Hymn of the Universe Sr

poetic language is to communicate reality itself, as
experienced, by means of imagery, evocation, tone,
and the ambiguity — or rather ambivalence — of par-
adox, of symbol That is not to say that poetic lan-
guage is nebulous, vague, uncertain: on the con-
trary, the cutting edge of great poetry is sharper
and digs deeper than that of any prose; But we
shall never hear what the mystic (or the poet or the
musician) has to tell us if we are listening on the
wrong wave-length.

"God needs man" said Angelus Silesius. If this
were a scientific-theological statement it would be
an absurdity, just as if Christ's "Lazarus our friend
is sleeping" were a scientific-medical statement it
would be a falsehood. The theologian has to re-
state, laboriously and at length, in his own lan-
guage what is contained in the mystic's flash of in-
tuition. (The words of Silesius come to mind
because there are lines in this book which both
echo them and elucidate them.) Thus there is no
need for us to be alarmed at such ideas as that of
God "animating" the world of matter, or of the
whole world "becoming incarnate": we shall find
plenty of parallels in St Paul and in the traditional
theological doctrine of the omnipresence of God.
And at the same time it should perhaps be said
that, while an acquaintance with P&re Teilhard's
scientific works must naturally be helpful in under-
standing fully this present book, it is by no means
necessary to know, still less to be in full agreement
with, the author's scientific theory in order to be
profoundly stirred and illumined by these pages.

The special response from the reader invited by

TramhtoSs Note 3

a book such as this is paralleled by the special <$e*
mands put upon the translator. Translation must al-
ways of course be a rendering not of word for word
but of idea for idea; to be content to transliterate
is merely illiterate. But whereas in translating sci-
entific prose the aim is simply to reproduce with
complete accuracy the author's statements, in
. translating "poetic" language the primary aim is not
just to reproduce statements about reality but, as
far as may be, to make the same communication of
reality — which will mean trying to reproduce some^
thing of the author's "tone of voice," something of
the mood and color of the original. And, it may be
added, a poem (unlike a scientific treatise) may
well defy an exact "literal" rendering, even were it
the job of the translator to attempt one. (For in-
stance, quite apart from the untimely echos of
Alice, and of Sir Winston Churchill's first steps with
the Latin primer, which the phrase would arouse,
you just cannot, in English, say "O Matter!") la
this book, then, and especially in the earlier part, I
have sometimes resorted to a slight verbal elabora-
tion, either because there was no alternative if one
was to write English at all, or because two words
seemed necessary to convey the full "poetic" con-
tent of one word in the French, or again because a
verbal elaboration seemed more likely to communi-
cate the color (and color is of the essence of vi-
sion) of the original. But I think it is true to say
that nowhere have I made any substantial addition
to or alteration of the author's insights and ideas;
and to a great extent, especially in the latter part of
the book, it was in fact possible to cling closely not

4 Hymn of the Universe

only to the sense but also to the wording of the
French.

The translation of the Latin in the footnotes fol-
lows the Douai version of the Bible.

GERALD VANN, O.P.

■ "' '■'.

INTRODUCTION

TO THE MASS
ON THE WORLD

This meditation suggested itself to P&re Teilhard
when, in the course of a scientific expedition, he
found himself one day out in the Ordos desert
where it was impossible for him to offer Mass. This
happened, it seems, on the feast of the Transfigura-
tion,* a feast for which he had a special love. His
thoughts therefore turned to the radiation of the
eucharistic presence of Christ through the universe.
He did not of course confuse that presence, the
effect of transubstantiation in the strict sense, with
the omnipresence of the divine Word. His faith in
the mystery of the Eucharist was not only ardent: it
was also as exact as it was firm. But his faith was
sufficiently strong and realistic to show him its con-
sequences (or, as he put it, the "prolongations" and

* Pere Teilhard could not have written The Mass on the
World on Easter Sunday 1923, as was reported by friends
from Peldn, for he did not reach the desert till August of
that year. There was doubtless a confusion between the two
feasts of Christ's glory. On a number of occasions Pere Teil-
hard expressed his special love for the feast of the Transfig-
uration. (Ed. note.)

6 Hymn qf the Universe ^

extensions). At a time ivhen individualism was still,
generally speaking, obscuring the fullness of tradi-
tional Catholic teaching on this mystery, he wrote;
"When Christ comes to one of his faithful it is not
simply in order to commune with him as an indi-
vidual; . .,- . when, through the mouth of the priest,
he says Hoc est corpus meufn, these words extend
beyond the morsel of bread over which they are
said: they give birth to the whole mystical body of
Christ. The effect of the priestly act extends
beyond the consecrated host to the cosmos itself
...... The entire realm of matter is slowly but ir-

restibly affected by this great consecration." *

Earlier, in 1917, P&re Teilhard had written, in Le
ErMrei

"Wheji Christ, extending the process of his incar-
nation, descends into the bread in order to replace
it, his action is not limited to the material morsel
which his presence will, for a brief moment, volatil-
ize: this transubstantiation is aureoled with a real
though attentuated divinizing of the entire uni-
verse. From the particular cosmic element into
which he has entered, the activity of the Word goes
forth to subdue and to draw into himself, all the
rest"

Such passages as these not only contain an exact
affirmation of the essence of the eucharistic mys-
tery, but also make an equally exact distinction be-
tween the essential mystery and the further effects
in which its fecundity is manifested: the growth of

* This was written in the same year as The Mass on the
World.

~

:-a

Introduction to the Mass on the World 7

Christ's mystical body, the consecration of tihe cos-
mos. They also bear witness to a plenitude of faith
in which P&re Teilhard's thought is revealed as
being authentically and profoundly in accord with
th$ thought of St Paul He "shows himself preoccu-
pied above all with giving his daily Mass a cosmic
function and planetary dimensions. . . . This, of
course, he considered could be linked up with the
most orthodox theology of the holy Eucharist"*

A year after writing The Mass on the World,
P&re Teilhard further defined his thought, in Men
Univers: "To interpret adequately the fundamental
position of the Eucharist in the economy of the
world ... it is, I think, necessary that Christian
thought and Christian prayer should give great im-
portance to the real and physical extensions of the
eucharistic Presence. ... As we properly use the
term "our bodies" to signify the localized center of
our spiritual radiations ... so it must be said that
in its initial and primary meaning the term TBody
of Christ" is limited, in this context, to the conse-
crated species of Bread and Wine. But ... the host
is comparable to a blazing fire whose flames spread
out like rays all round it."

N. M. WDLDEERS, S.T.D.

* Nicolas Corter The Life and Soul of Teilhard de Chardin
(Eng. trans. Barrie & Rockliff, 1960), p. 26.

0&1

The Offering

Since once again, Lord — though this time not in the
forests of the Aisne but in the steppes of Asia — I
have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I will raise
myself beyond these symbols, up to the pure maj-
esty of the real itself; I, your priest, will make the
whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the
labors and sufferings of the world.

Over there, on the horizon, the sun has Just
touched with light the outermost fringe of the east-
ern sky. Once again, beneath this moving sheet of
fire, the living surf ace of the earth wakes and trem-
bles, and once again begins its fearful travail I will
place on my paten, O God, the harvest to be won
by this renewal of labor. Into my chalice I shall
pour all the sap which is to be pressed out this day
from the earth's fruits.

My paten and my chalice are the depths of a soul
laid widely open to all the forces which in a mo-
ment will rise up from every corner of the earth
and converge upon the Spirit. Grant me the remem-
brance and the mystic presence of all those whom
the light is now awakening to the new day.

My paten and my chalice are the depths of a soul
laid widely open to all the forces which in a mo-
ment will rise up from every corner of the earth
and converge upon the Spirit Grant me the remem-

12 Hymn of the Universe

brance and the mystic presence of all those whom
the light is now awakening to the new day.

One by one, Lord, I see and I love all those
whom you have .given me to sijstain and charm my
life. One by one also I number all those who make
up that other beloved family which has gradually
surrounded me, its unity fashioned out of the most
disparate elements, with affinities of the heart, of
scientific research and of thought And again one
by one — more vaguely it is true, yet all inclusively
— I call before me the whole vast anonymous army
of living humanity; those who surround me and
support me thougji I do not know them; those
who come, and those who go; above all, those
who in office, laboratory and factory, through their
vision of truth or despite their error, truly believe
in the progress of earthly reality and who today
will take up again their impassioned pursuit of the
light

This restless multitude, confused or orderly, the
immensity of which terrifies us; this ocean of hu-
manity whose slow, monotonous wave-flows trouble
the hearts even of those whose faith is most firm: it
is to this deep that I thus desire all the fibers of my
being should respond. All the things in the world to
which this day will bring increase; all those that
will diminish; all those too that will die: all of
them, Lord, I try to gather into my arms, so as to
hold them out to you in offering. This is the mate-
rial of my sacrifice; the only material you desire.

Once upon a time men took into your temple the
first fruits of their harvests, the flower of their
flocks. But the offering you really want, the offer-

TKe Mass on the World 13

ing you mysteriously need evety day to appease
your hunger, to slake your thirst is nothing less
than the growth of the world borne ever onwards
in the stream of universal becoming.

Receive, O Lord, this all-embracing host which
your whole creation, moved by your magnetism,
offers you at this dawn of a new day.

This bread, our toil, is of itself, I know, but an
immense fragmentation; this wine, our pain, is no
more, I know, than a draught that dissolves. Yet in
the very depths of this formless mass you have im-
planted — and this I am sure of, for I sense it — a de-
sire, irresistible, hallowing, which makes us cry out,
believer and unbeliever alike: "Lord, make us one."

Because, my God, though I lack the soul-zeal and
the sublime integrity of your saints, I yet have re-
ceived from you an, overwhelming sympathy for all
that stirs within the dark mass of matter; because I
know myself to be irremediably less a child of
heaven than a son of earth; therefore I will this
morning climb up in spirit to the high places, bear-
ing with me the hopes and the miseries of my
mother; and there — empowered by that priesthood
which you alone (as I firmly believe) have be-
stowed on me — upon all that in the world of
human flesh is now about to be born or to die be-
neath the rising sun I will call down the Fire.

Fire over the Earth

Fire, the source of being: we cling so tenaciously to
the illusion that fire comes forth from the depths of
the earth and that its flames grow progressively

>'.....„.. .

14 Hymn of the Universe

brighter as it pours along the radiant furrows of
life's tillage. Lord, in your mercy you gave me to
see that this idea is false, and that I must overthrow
it if I were ever to have sight of you.

In the beginning was Power, intelligent, loving,
energizing. In the beginning was the Word, su-
premely capable of mastering and molding what-
ever might come into being in the world of matter.
In the beginning there were not coldness and dark-
ness: there was the Fire. This is the truth.

So, far from light emerging gradually out of the
womb of our darkness, it is the Light, existing be-
fore all else was made which, patiently, surely,
eliminates our darkness. As for us creatures, of our-
selves we are but emptiness and obscurity. But you,
my God, are the inmost depths, the stability of that
eternal milieu, without duration or space, in which
our cosmos emerges gradually into being and
grows gradually to its final completeness, as it loses
those boundaries which to our eyes seem so im-
mense. Everything is being; everywhere there is
being and nothing but being, save in the fragmen-
tation of creatures and the clash of their atoms.

Blazing Spirit, Fire, personal, super-substantial,
the consummation of a union so immeasurably
more lovely and more desirable than that destruc-
tive fusion of which all the pantheists dream: be
pleased yet once again to come down and breathe
a soul into the newly formed, fragile film of matter
with which this day the world is to be freshly
clothed.

I know we cannot forestall, still less dictate to

The Mass on the World 15

you, even the smallest of your actions; from you
alone comes all initiative— and this applies in the
first place to my prayer.

Radiant Word, blazing Power, you who mold the
manifold so as to breathe your life into it; I pray
you, lay on us those your hands — powerful, consid-
erate, omnipresent, those hands which do not (like
our human hands) touch now here, now there, but
which plunge into the depths and the totality, pres-
ent and past, of things so as to reach us simultane-
ously through all that is most immense and most in-
ward within us and around us.

May the might of those invincible hands direct
and transfigure for the great world you have in
mind that earthly travail which I have gathered
into my heart and now offer you in its entirety.
Remold it, rectify it, recast it down to the depths
from whence it springs. You know how your crea-
tures can come into being only, like shoot from
stem, as part of an endlessly renewed process of ev-
olution.

Do you now therefore, speaking through my lips,
pronounce over this earthly travail your twofold
efficacious word: the word without which all that
our wisdom and our experience have built up must
totter and crumble— the word through which all
our most far-reaching speculations and our encoun-
ter with the universe are come together into a
unity. Over every living thing which is to spring
up, to grow, to flower, to ripen during this day say
again the words: This is my Body. And over every
death-force which waits in readiness to corrode, to

16 Hymn of the Universe ."

wither, to cut down, speak again your commanding
words which express the suprenie mystery of faith:
This is my Blood.*

Fire in the Earth

It is done.

Once again the Fire has penetrated the earth.

Not with sudden crash of thunderbolt, riving the
mountain-tops: does the Master break down doors
to enter his own home? Without earthquake, or
thunderclap: the flame has lit up the whole world
from within. All things individually and collectively
are penetrated and flooded by it, from the inmost
core of the tiniest atom to the mighty sweep of the
most universal laws of being: so naturally has it
flooded every element, every energy, every con-
necting link in the unity of our cosmos; that one

* As was pointed out in the Introduction, there is no confu-
sion here between transubstantiation in the strict sense and
the universal presence of the Word: as the author states ex-
plicitly in Le Pritre, "The central mystery of transubstantia-
tion is aureoled by a divinization, real though attenuated, of
all the universe." From the cosmic element into which he has
entered through his incarnation and in which he dwells eu-
charistically, "the Word acts upon everything else to subdue
and assimilate it to himself/' (Ed. note.)
might suppose the cosmos to have burst sponta-
neously into flame.

In the new humanity which is begotten today the
Word prolongs the unending act of his own birth;
arid by virtue of his immersion in the world's womb
the great waters of the kingdom of matter have,

The Mass on the World 17

without even a ripple, been endued with life. No
visible tremor marks this inexpressible transforma-
tion; and yet, mysteriously and in very truth, at the
touch of the supersubstantial Word the immense
host which is the universe is made flesh. Through
your own incarnation, my God, all matter is hence-
forth incarnate.

Through our thoughts and our human experi-
ences, we long ago became aware of the strange
properties which make the universe so like our
flesh:

like the flesh it attracts us by the charm which
lies in the mystery of its curves and folds and in the
depths of its eyes;

like the flesh it disintegrates and eludes us when
submitted to our analyses or to our fallings off and
in the process of its own perdurance;

as with the flesh, it can only be embraced in the
endless reaching out to attain what lies beyond the
confines of what has been given to us.

All of us, Lord, from the moment we are born
feel within us this disturbing mixture of remoteness
and nearness; and in our heritage of sorrow and
hope, passed down to us through the ages, there is
no yearning more desolate than that which makes
us weep with vexation and desire as we stand in
the midst of the Presence which hovers about us
nameless and impalpable and is dwelling in all
things. Si forte attrectent eum*

Now, Lord, through the consecration of the

* "That they [all mankind] should seek God, if happily they
may feel after him or find him. . • •" (Acts 17.27.)

18 Hymn of the Universe

world the luminosity and fragrance which suffuse
the universe take on for me the lineaments of a
body and a f ace-r-in you. What my mind glimpsed
through its hesitant explorations,- vNhat my heart
cxraved with so little expectation of fulfillment, you
now magnificently unfold for me: the fact that your
creatures are not merely so linked together in soli-
darity that none can exist unless all the rest sur-
round it, but that all are so dependent on a single
central reality that a true life, borne in common by
them all, gives them ultimately their consistence
and their unity.

Shatter, my God, through the daring of your rev-
elation the childishly timid outlook that can con-
ceive of nothing greater or more vital in the world
than the pitiable perfection of our human organ-
ism. On the road to a bolder comprehension of the
universe the children of this world day by day out-
distance the masters of Israel; but do you, Lord
Jesus, "in whom all things subsist," show yourself to
those who love you as the higher Soul and the
physical center of your creation. Are you not well
aware that for us this is a question of life or death?
As for me, if I could not believe that your real Pres-
ence animates and makes tractable and enkindles
even the very least of the energies which invade me
or brush past me, would I not die of cold?

I thank you, my God, for having in a thousand
different ways led my eyes to discover the immense
simplicity of things. Little by little, through the ir-
resistible development of those yearnings you im-
planted in me ,as a child, through the influence of

The Mass on the World 19

gifted friends who entered my life at certain
moments to bring light and strength to my mind,
and through the awakenings of spirit I owe to the
successive initiations, gentle and terrible, which
you caused me- to undergo: through all these I have
been brought to the point where I can no longer
see anything, nor any longer breathe, outside that
milieu in which all is made one.

At this moment when your life has just poured
with superabundant vigor into the sacrament of the
world, I shall savor with heightened consciousness
the intense yet tranquil rapture of a vision whose
coherence and harmonies I can never exhaust

What I experience as I stand in face of — and in
the very depths of — this world which your flesh has
assimilated, this world which has become your
flesh, my God, is not the absorption of the monist
who yearns to be dissolved into the unity of things,
nor the emotion felt by the pagan as he lies pros-
trate before a tangible divinity, nor yet the passive
self-abandonment of the quietist tossed hither and
thither at the mercy of mystical impulsions. Prom
each of these modes of thought I take something of
their motive force while avoiding their pitfalls: the
approach determined for me by your omnipresence
is a wonderful synthesis wherein three of the most
formidable passions that can unlock the human
heart rectify each other as they mingle: like the
monist I plunge into the all-inclusive One; but the
One is so perfect that as it receives me and I lose
myself in it I can find in it the ultimate perfection
of my own individuality;

20 Hymn of the Universe

like the pagan '1 worship a God who can be
touched; arid I do indeed touch him— this God —
over the whole surface and in- the depths of that
world of matter which confines irie: Trot to take
hold of him as I would wish (simply in order not to
stop touching him), I must go always on and on
through and beyond each undertaking/ unable to
rest in anything, borne onwards at each moment by
creatures and at each moment going beyond them,
in a continuing welcoming of them and a continu-
ing detachment from them;

like the quietist I allow myself with delight to be
cradled in the divine fantasy: but at the same time
I know that the divine will, will only be revealed to
meat each moment if I exert myself to the utmost?
I shall only touch God in the world of matter,
when, like Jacob, I have been vanquished by him.

Thus, because the ultimate objective, the totality
to which my nature is attuned has been made man-
ifest to me, the powers of my being begin sponta-
neously to vibrate in accord with a single note of
incredible richness wherein I can distinguish the
most discordant tendencies effortlessly resolved:
the excitement of action and the delight of pass-
ivity: the joy of possessing and the thrill of reach-
ing out beyond what one possesses; the pride
in growing and the happiness of being lost in what
is greater than oneself.

Rich with the sap of the world, I rise up towards
the Spirit whose vesture is the magnificence of the
material universe but who smiles at me from far
beyond all victories; and, lost in the mystery of the

The Mass on the World 21

flesh of God, I cannot tell which is the more radiant
bliss: to have found the Word and so be able to
achieve the #ia$tery of matter, or to have mastered
matter and so be able to attain and submit to the
light of God. '."■■;"[,;.,

Grant, Lord, that your descent into the universal
Species may not be for me just something loved
and cherished, like the fruit of some philosophical
speculation, but may become for me truly a real
Presence. Whether we like it or not by power and
by right you are incarnate in the world, and we are
all of us dependent upon you. But in fact you are
far, and how far, from being equally close to us all.
We are all of us together carried in the one world-
womb; yet each of us is our own little microcosm in
which the Incarnation is wrought independently
with degrees of intensity, and shades that are in-
communicable. And that is why, in our prayer at
the altar, we ask that the consecration may be
brought about for us: Ut nobis Corpus el San-
guis fiat . . .* If I firmly believe that everything
around me is the body and blood of the Word,**
then for me (and in one sense for me alone) is
brought about that marvelous "diaphany" which
causes the luminous warmth of a single life to be
objectively discernible in and to shine forth from

* "That it may become for us the Body and Blood of your
dearly loved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ."

** Through the "physical and overmastering" contact of him
whose appanage it is to be able omnia sibi subicere [''to sub-
due all things unto himself." Phil. 3.21]. {Le Milieu Divin,
Eng. trans, p. 114.)

22 Hymn of the Universe

the depths of every event, every element: whereas
if, unhappily, my faith should flag, at once the light
is quenched and everything becomes darkened, ev-
erything disintegrates.

You have come down, Lord, into this day which
is now beginning. But alas, how infinitely different
in degree is your presence for one and another of
us in the events which are now preparing and
which all of us together will experience! In the very
same circumstances which are soon to surround me
and my fellowmen you may be present in small
measure, in great measure, more and more or not
atali.

Therefore, Lord, that no poison may harm me
this day, no death destroy me, no wine befuddle
me, that in every creature I may discover and sense
you, I beg you: give me faith.

Communion

If the Fire has come down into the heart of the
world it is, in the last resort, to lay hold on me and
to absorb me. Henceforth I cannot be content sim-
ply to contemplate it or, by my steadfast faith, to
intensify its ardency more and more in the world
around me. What I must do, when I have taken
part with all my energies in the consecration which
causes its flames to leap forth, is to consent to the
communion which will enable it to find in me the
food it has come in the last resort to seek.

So, my God, I prostrate myself before your pres-
ence in the universe which has now become living

The Mass on the World 23

flame: beneath the lineaments of all that I shall en-
counter this day, all that happens to me, all that!
achieve, it is you I desire, you I await

It is a terrifying thing to have been born: I mean,
to find oneself, without having willed it, swept ir-
revocably along on a torrent of fearful energy
which seems as though it wished to destroy every*
thing it carries with it

What I want, my God, is that by a reversal of
forces which you alone can bring about, my terror
in face of the nameless changes destined to renew
my being may be turned into an overflowing joy at
being transformed into you.

First of all I shall stretch out my hand unhesitat-
ingly towards the fiery bread which you set before
me. This bread, in which you have planted the seed
of all that is to develop in the future, I recognize as
containing the source and the secret of that destiny
you have chosen for me. To take it is, I know, to
surrender myself to forces which will tear me away
painfully from myself in order to drive me into
danger, into laborious undertakings, into a constant
renewal of ideas, into an austere detachment where
my affections are concerned. To eat it is to acqufee
a taste and an affinity for that which in everything
is above everything — a taste and an affinity which
will henceforward make impossible for me all the
joys by which my life has been warmed. Lord
Jesus, I am willing to be possessed by you, to be
bound to your body and led by its inexpressible
power towards those solitary heights which by
myself I should never dare to climb. Xnsttocfc*

24 Hymn of the Universe

ively, like all mankind, I would rather set up
my tent here bgjtaw on some hilltop of my own
choosing. I am afraid, too, like all my fellowmen,
of the future too heavy with mystery and too
wholly new, towards which time is driving
me. Then like these men I wonder anxiously
where life is leading me, . • • May this com-
munion of bread with the Christ clothed in the
powers which dilate the world free me from my
timidities and my heedlessness! In the whirlpool of
conflicts and energies out of which must develop
my power to apprehend and experience your holy
presence, I throw myself , my God, on your word.
The man who is filled with an impassioned love of
Jesus hidden in the forces which bring increase to
the earth, him the earth will lift up, like a mother,
in the immensity of her arms, and will enable him
to contemplate the face of God.

If your kingdom, my God, were of this world, I
could possess you simply by surrendering myself to
the forces which cause us, through suffering and
dying, to grow visibly in stature— us or that which
is dearer to us than ourselves. But because the term
towards which the earth is moving lies not merely
beyond each individual thing but beyond the total-
ity of things; because the world travails, not to
bring forth from within itself some supreme reality,
but to find its consummation through a union with
a preexistent Being; it follows that man can never
reach the blazing center of the universe simply by
living more and more for himself nor even by
spending his life in the service of some earthly
cause however great. The world can never be defin-

The Mass on the World 25

itively united with you, Lord, saveJby/a sort of re-
versal, a turning about, an e^der^tratvcm 9 which
must involve the temporary collapse not merely of
all individual achievements but even of everything
that looks like an advancement for humanity. If my
being is ever to be decisively attached to yours,
there must first die in me not merely the monad ego
but also the world: in other words I must first pass
through an agonizing phase of diminution for
which no tangible compensation will be given me.
That is why, pouring into my chalice the bitterness
of all separations, of all limitations, and of all ster-
ile fallings away, you then hold it out to me. "Drink
ye all of this."

How could I refuse this chalice, Lord, now that
through the bread you have given me there has
crept into the marrow of my being an inextinguish-
able longing to be united with you beyond life;
through death? The consecration of the world
would have remained incomplete, a moment ago,
had you not with special love vitalized for those
who believe, not only the life-bringing forces, but
also those which bring death. My communion
would be incomplete — would, quite simply, not be
Christian — if, together with the gains which this
new day brings me, I did not also accept, in my
own name and in the name of the world as the
most immediate sharing in your own being, those
processes, hidden or manifest, of enfeeblement, of
aging, of death, which unceasingly consume the
universe, to its salvation or its condemnation. My
God, I deliver myself up with utter abandon to
those fearful forces of dissolution which, I blindly

26 Hymn of the Universe

believe, will tins day cause my narrow ego to be re-
placed by your cjivine presence. The man who is
filled with an impassioned love for Jesus hidden in
the forces which bring death to the earth, him the
earth will clasp in the immensity of her arms as her
strength fails, and with her he will awaken in the
bosom of God,

Prayer

Lord Jesus, now that beneath those world forces
you have become truly and physically everything
for me, everything about me, everything within me,
I shall gather into a single prayer both my delight
in what I have and my thirst for what I lack; and
following the lead of your great servant I shall re-
peat those enflamed words in which, I firmly be-
lieve, the Christianity of tomorrow will find its
increasingly clear portrayal:

"Lord, lock me up in the deepest depths of your
heart; and then, holding me there, burn me, purify
me, set me on fire, sublimate me, till I become ut-
terly what you would have me be, through the
utter annihilation of my ego." *

Tu autem, Domine mi, include me in imis visceri-

*The term "ego" is used here (in contrast to the "true
self') to denote the proud, defiant self-reliance, the at-
tempted autonomy, of man in revolt against God. Only
through the death of the ego can the true self be liberated;
for man is truly himself only when he has replaced his ego-
centridty by theocentricity and thus found his true self by
looking for it in God, in whom alone we 'live and move
and have our being." (Tr. note.)

The Mass on the World 27

bus Cordis tui. Atque ibi me define, excoque, ex-
purga, accende, ignifac, subUmti? ad putissimum
Cordis tui gustum atque placitutii^ ad puram an-
nihitationem meant *

"Lord/* Yes, at last, through the twofold mystery
of this universal consecration and communion I
have found one to whom I can wholeheartedly give
this name. As long as I could see-or dared see-in
you, Lord Jesus, only the man who lived two thou-
sand years ago, the sublime moral teacher, the
Friend, the Brother, my love remained timid and
constrained. Friends, brothers, wise mens have we
not many of these around us, great souls, chosen
souls, and much closer to us? And then can man
ever give himself utterly to a nature which is
purely human? Always from the very first it was
the world, greater than all the elements which
make up the world, that I was in love with; and
never before was there anyone before whom I
could in honesty bow down. And so for a long time,
even though I believed, I strayed, not knowing
what it was I loved. But now, Master, today, when
through the manifestation of those superhuman
powers with which your resurrection endowed you
you shine forth from within all the forces of the
earth and so become visible to me, now I recognize
you as my Sovereign, and with delight I surrender
myself to you.

How strange, my God, are the processes your

* "And thou, my Lord, enfold me in the depths of thy Heart
And there keep me, refine, purge, kindle, set on fire, raise
aloft, according to the most pure desire of thy Heart, and
for my cleansing extinction."

28 Hymn of the Universe

Spirit initiates! When, two centuries ago, your
Church began tb^feel the particular power of your
heart, it might nave seemed that what was capti-
vating men's souls was the fact of their finding in
you an element even more determinate, more cir-
cumscribed, than your humanity as a whole. But
now on the contrary a swift reversal is making us
aware that your main purpose in this revealing to
us of your heart was to enable our love to escape
from the constrictions of the too narrow, too pre-
cise, too limited image of you which we had
fashioned for ourselves. What I discern in your
breast is simply a furnace of fire; and the more I fix
my gaze on its ardency the more it seems to me
that all around it the contours of your body melt
away and become enlarged beyond all measure, till
the only features I can distinguish in you are those
of the face of a world which has burst into flame.

Glorious Lord Christ: the divine influence se-
cretly diffused and active in the depths of matter,
and the dazzling center where all the innumerable
fibers of the manifold meet; power as implacable as
the world and as warm as life; you whose forehead
is of the whiteness of snow, whose eyes are of fire,
and whose feet are brighter than molten gold; you
whose hands imprison the stars; you who are the
first and the last, the living and the dead and the
risen again; you who gather into your exuberant
unity every beauty, every affinity, every energy,
every mode of existence; it is you to whom my
being cried out with a desire as vast as the uni-
verse, "In truth you are my Lord and my God."

"Lord, lock me up within you"s yes indeed I be-

The Mass on the World 29

lieve— and this belief is so strong mat it has be-
come one of the supports of my inner life — that an
"exterior darkness" which was wholly outside you
would be pure nothingness. Nothing, Lord Jesus,
can subsist outside of your flesh; so that even those
who have been cast out from your love are still, un-
happily for them, the beneficiaries of your presence
upholding them in existence. All of us, inescapably,
exist in you, the universal milieu in which and
through which all things live and have their being.
But precisely because we are not self-contained
ready-made entities which can be conceived
equally well as being near to you or remote from
you; precisely because in us the self-subsistent indi-
vidual who is united to you grows only insofar as
the union itself grows, that union whereby we are
given more and more completely to you: I beg you,
Lord, in the name of all that is most vital in my
being, to hearken to the desire of this thing that I
dare to call my soul even though I realize more and
more every day how much greater it is than myself,
and, to slake my thirst for life, draw me— through
the successive zones of your deepest substance—
into the secret recesses of your inmost heart

The deeper the level at which one encounters
you, Master, the more one realizes the universality
of your influence. This is the criterion by which I
can judge at each moment how far I have pro-
gressed within you. When all the things around me,
while preserving their own individual contours,
their own special savors, nevertheless appear to me
as animated by a single secret spirit and therefore
as diffused and intermingled within a single ele-

30 Hymn of the Universe

ment, infinitely close, infinitely remote; and when,
locked within the jealous intimacy of a divine sanc-
tuary, I yet feel myself to be wandering at large in
the empyrean of all created beings: then I shall
know that I am approaching that central point
where the heart of the world is caught in the de-
scending radiance of the heart of Go A

And then, Lord, at that point where all things are
set ablaze, do you act upon me through the united
flames of all those internal and external influences
which, were I less close to you, would be neutral or
ambivalent or hostile, but which when animated by
an Energy quae possit sibi omnia subjicere* be-
come, in the physical depths of your heart, the an-
gels of your triumphant activity. Through a marvel-
ous combination of your divine magnetism with
the charm and the inadequacy of creatures, with
their sweetness and their malice, the disap-
pointing weakness and their terrifying power,
do you fill my heart alternately with exaltation and
with distaste; teach it the true meaning of purity:
not a debilitating separation from all created real-
ity but an impulse carrying one through all forms
of created beauty; show it the true nature of char-
ity: not a sterile fear of doing wrong but a vigor-
ous determination that all of us together shall break
open the doors of life; and give it finally— give it.
above all — through an ever-increasing awareness
of your omnipresence, a blessed desire to go on
advancing, discovering, fashioning and experi-

* "Which is able to subdue all things unto itself."'

The Mass on the World 31

encing the world so as to penetrate even further
and further into yourself.

For me, my God, all joy and all achievement, the
very purpose of my being and all my love of life, all
depend on this one basic vision of the union be-
tween yourself and the universe. Let others, fulfill-
ing a function more august than mine, proclaim
your splendors as pure Spirit; as for m§, dominated
as I am by a vocation which springs from the in-
most fibers of my being, I have no desire, I have no
ability, to proclaim anything except the innumera-
ble prolongations of your incarnate Being in the
world of matter; I can preach only the mystery of
your flesh, you the Soul shining forth through all
that surrounds us.

. It is to your body in this its fullest extension—
that is, to the world become through your power ,
and my faith the glorious living crucible in which
everything melts away in order to be born anew; it
is to this that I dedicate myself with all the re-
sources which your creative magnetism has brought
forth in me: with the all too feeble resources of my
scientific knowledge, with my religious vows, with
my priesthood, and (most dear to me) with my
deepest human convictions. It is in this dedication,
Lord Jesus, I desire to live, in this I desire to die.

Ordos 1923

CHBIST
IN THE WORLD

OF MATTER

0h

THREE STORIES IN
THE STYLE OF BENSON*

My friend** is dead, he who drank of life every-
where as at a sacred spring. His heart burned
within him. His body lies hidden in the earth in
front of Verdun. Now therefore I can repeat some
of those words with which he initiated me one
evening into that intense vision which gave light
and peace to his life.

"You want to know," he said, "how the universe,
in all its power and multiplicity, came to assume
for me the lineaments of the face of Christ? This
came about gradually; and it is difficult to find
words in which to analyze life-renewing intuitions
such as these; still, I can tell you about some of the
experiences through which the light of this aware-

• Pere Teilhard sometimes called these stories histoires,
sometimes contes, written in the manner of Benson: a story
about mysticism by R. H. Benson had made a lasting impres-
sion on him. (Cf. Le Milieu Divin, Eng. trans, p. 124.)
(Ed. note.)

*° In these stories, too intimate in character for the author
not to feel the need to disguise his identity, the "friend" is
clearly himself. (Ed. note.)

36 Hymn of the Universe -

ness gradually entered into my soul as though at
the gradual, jerky raising of a curtain. . . "

The Picture

"At that time," he began, "my mind was preoccu-
pied with a problem partly philosophical, partly
aesthetic. I was thinking: Suppose Christ should
deign to appear here before me, what would he
look like? How would he be dressed? Above all, in
what manner would he take his place visibly in the
realm of matter, and how would he stand out
against the objects surrounding him? . . . And con-
fusedly I found myself saddened and shocked at
the idea that the body of Christ could stand in the
midst of a crowd of inferior bodies on the world's
stage without their sensing and recognizing,
through some perceptible change, this Intensity so
close beside them.

"Meanwhile my gaze had come to rest without
conscious intention on a picture representing Christ
offering his heart to men. The picture was hanging
in front of me on the wall of a church into which I
had gone to pray. So, pursuing my train of thought,
j began to ask myself how an artist could contrive
to represent the holy humanity of Jesus without im-
posing on his body a fixity, a too precise definition,
which would seem to isolate him from all other
men, and without giving to his face a too individual
expression so that, while being beautiful, its beauty
would be of a particular kind, excluding all other
kinds.

"It was, then, as I was keenly pondering over

Christ in the World of Matter 37

these things and looking at the picture, that my vi-
sion began. To tell the truth, I cannot say at what
precise moment it began, for it had already reached
a certain degree of intensity when I became con-
scious of it. The fact remains that as I allowed my
gaze to wander over the figure's outlines I suddenly
became aware that these were melting away: they
were dissolving, but in a special manner, hard to
describe in words. When I tried to hold in my gaze
the outline of the figure of Christ it seemed to me
to be clearly defined; but then, if I let this effort
relax, at once these contours, and the folds of
Christ's garment, the luster of his hair and the
bloom of his flesh, all seemed to merge as it were
(though without vanishing away) into the rest of
the picture. It was as though the planes which
marked off the figure of Christ from the world
surrounding it were melting into a single vibrant
surf ace whereon all demarcations vanished.

"It seems to me that this transformation began at
one particular point on the outer edge of the figure;
and that it flowed on thence until it had affected its
entire outline. This at least is how the process ap-
peared to me to be taking place. From this initial
moment, moreover, the metamorphosis spread rap-
idly until it had affected everything.

"First of all I perceived that the vibrant atmos-
phere which surrounded Christ like an aure-
ole was no longer confined to a narrow space about
him, but radiated outwards to infinity. Through
this there passed from time to time what seemed
like trails of phosphorescence, indicating a continu-
ous gushing forth to the outermost spheres of the

38 Hymn of the Universe

realm of matter and delineating a sort of blood
stream or nervous system running through the to-
tality of Bfe,

"The entire universe was nlbrantl And yet, when
I directed my gaze to particular objects, one by
one, I found them still as clearly defined as ever in
their undiminished individuality.

"Ail this movement seemed to emanate from
Christ, and above all from his heart. And it was
while I was attempting to trace the emanation to its
source and to capture its rhythm that, as my atten-
tion returned to the portrait itself, I saw the vision
mount rapidly to its climax.

"I notice I have forgotten to tell you about
Christ's garments. They had that luminosity we
read of in the account of the Transfiguration; but
what struck me most of all was the fact that no
weaver s hand had fashioned them — unless the
hands of angels are those of Nature. No coarsely
spun threads composed their weft; rather it was
matter, a bloom of matter, which had spontane-
ously woven a marvelous stuff out of the in-
most depths of its substance; and it seemed as
though I could see the stitches running on and on
indefinitely, and harmoniously blending together in
to a natural design which profoundly affected them
in their own nature.

c< But, as you .will, understand* I could spare only
a passing glance for this garment so marvelously
woven by the continuous cooperation of all the
energies and the whole order of matter: it was the
transfigured face of the Master that drew and held
captive my entire attention.

Christ in the World of Matter 38

"You have often at nighttime seen how certain
stars change their color from the gleam of blood-
red pearls to the luster of violet velvet You have
seen, too, the play of colors on a transparent bub-
ble. So it was that on the unchanging face of Jesus ;
there shone, in an indescribable shimmer or irides-
cence, all the radiant hues of all our modes of
beauty. I cannot say whether this took place in an-
swer to my desires or in obedience to the good
pleasure of him who knew and directed my desires;
what is certain is that these innumerable gradations
of majesty, of sweetness, or irresistible appeal, fol-
lowing one another or becoming transformed and
melting into one another, together made up a har-
mony which brought me complete satiety;

"And always, beneath this moving surf ace, up*
holding it and at the same time gathering it into
a higher unity, there hovered the incommunicable
beauty of Christ himself. Yet that beauty was some-
thing I divined rather than perceived; for whenever
I tried to pierce through the covering of inferior
beauties which hid it from me, at once other indi-
vidual and fragmentary beauties rose up before me
and formed another veil over the true Beauty even
while kindling my desire for it and giving me a
foretaste of it.

"It was the whole face that shone in this way.
But the center of the radiance and the iridescence
was hidden in the transfigured portrait's eyes.

"Over the glorious depths of those eyes there
passed in rainbow hues the reflection — unless in-
deed it were the creative prototype, the Idea—of
everything that has power to charm us, everything

40 Hymn of the Universe

that has life. . « , And the luminous simplicity of the
fire which flashed from them changed, as I strug-
gled to master it, into an inexhaustible complexity
wherein were gathered all the glances that have
ever warmed and mirrored back a human heart
Thus, for example, these eyes which at first were so
gentle and filled with pity that I thought my
mother stood before me, became an instant later,
like those of a woman, passionate and filled with
the power to subdue, yet at the same time so im-
periously pure that under their domination it
would have been physically impossible for the
emotions to go astray. And then they changed
ag^in, and became filled with a noble, virile
majesty, similar to that which one sees in the eyes
of men of great courage or refinement or strength,
but incomparably more lofty to behold and more
delightful to submit to.

"This scintillation of diverse beauties was so
complete, so captivating, and also so swift that I
felt it touch and penetrate all my powers simulta-
neously, so that the very core of my being vibrated
in response to it, sounding a unique note of expan-
sion and happiness.

"Now while I was ardently gazing deep into the
pupils of Christ's eyes, which had become abysses
df fiery, fascinating life, suddenly I beheld rising
up from the depths of those same eyes what
seemed like a cloud, blurring and blending all that
variety I have been describing to you. Little by lit-
tle an extraordinary expression, of great intensity,
spread over the diverse shades of meaning which

Christ iriiheWoM of Matter 41

the divine eyes revealed, first of all permeating
them and then finally absorbing them all. . „ •

"And I stood dumbfounded.

Tor this final expression, which had dominated
and gathered up into itself all the others, was inde-
cipherable. I simply could not tell whether it
denoted an indescribable agony or a supera-
bundance of triumphant joy. I only know that since
that moment I thought I caught a glimpse of it
once again — in the glance of a dying soldier.

"In an instant my eyes were bedimmed with
tears. And then, when I was once again able to look
at it, the painting of Christ on the church wall had
assumed once again its too precise definition and its
fixity of feature."

The Monstrance

When he had reached the end of his narrative my
friend remained for some time silent and lost in
thought, his clasped hands resting in a characteris-
tic attitude on his crossed knees. The light was
fading. I pressed a switch, and the lamp on my
desk lit up. It was a very pretty lamp; its pedestal
and shade were made of diaphanous sea-green
glass, and the bulbs were so ingeniously placed
that the entire mass of crystal and the designs
which decorated it were illumined from within.

My friend gave a start; and I noticed that his
gaze remained fixed on the lamp, as though to draw
from it his memories of the past, as he began again
to confide in me.

42 Hymn of the Universe

"On another occasion," he said, "X was again in a
church and had just knelt down before the Blessed
Sacrament exposed in a monstrance when I experi-
enced a very strange impression.

"You must, I feel sure, have observed that optical
illusion which makes a bright spot against a dark
background seem to expand and grow bigger? It
was something of this sort that I experienced as I
gazed at the host, its white shape standing out
sharply, despite the candles on the altar, against
the darkness of the choir. At least, that is what hap-
pened to begin with; later on, as you shall hear, my
experience assumed proportions which no physical
analogy could express.

*1 had then the impression as I gazed at the host
that its surface was gradually spreading out like a
spot of oil but of course much more swiftly and lu-
minously. At the beginning it seemed to me that I
alone had noticed any change, and that it was tak-
ing place without awakening any desire or encoun-
tering any obstacle. But little by little, as the white
orb grew and grew in space till it seemed to be
drawing quite close to me, I heard a subdued
sound, an immeasurable murmur, as when the ris-
ing tide extends its silver waves over the world of
the algae which tremble and dilate at its approach,
or when the burning heather crackles as fire
spreads over the heath.

"Thus in the midst of a great sigh suggestive
both of an awakening and of a plaint the flow of
whiteness enveloped me, passed beyond me, over-
ran everything. At the same time everything,

Christ in the World of Matter 43

though drowned in this whiteness, preserved its
own proper shape, its own autonomous movement;
for the whiteness did not efface the features or
change the nature of anything, but penetrated
objects at the core of their being, at a level more
profound even than their own life. It was as though
a milky brightness were illuminating. the universe
from within, and everything were fashioned of the
same kind of translucent flesh.

"You see, when you switched on the lamp just
now and the glass which had been dark became
bright and fluorescent, I recalled how the world
had appeared to me then; and indeed it was this as-
sociation of images which prompted me to tell you
this story.

"So, through the mysterious expansion of the host
the whole world had become incandescent, had it-
self become like a single giant host One would
have said that, under the influence of this inner
light which penetrated it, its fibers were stretched
to breaking point and all the energies within them
were strained to the utmost. And I was thinking
that already in this opening out of its activity the
cosmos had attained its plenitude when I became
aware that a much more fundamental process was
going on within it

"From moment to moment sparkling drops of
pure metal were forming on the inner surface of
things and then falling into the heart of this pro-
found light, in which they vanished; and at the
same time a certain amount of dross was being vol-
atilized: a transformation was taking place in the

44 Hymn of the Universe

domain of love, dilating, purifying and gathering
together every power-to-love which the universe
contains.

"This I could realize the more easily inasmuch as
its influence was operative in me myself as well as
in other things: the white glow was active; the
whiteness was consuming all things from within
themselves. It had penetrated, through the chan-
nels of matter, into the inmost depths of all hearts
and then had dilated them to breaking point, only
in order to take back into itself the substance of
their affections and passions. And now that it had
established its hold on them it was irresistibly pull-
ing back towards its center all the waves that had
spread outwards from it, laden now with the purest
honey of all loves.

"And in actual fact the immense host, having
given life to everything and purified everything,
was now slowly contracting; and the treasures it
was drawing into itself were joyously pressed close
together within its living light

"When a wave recedes or a flame dies down, the
area which has been covered for a moment by sea
or fire is marked by the shining pools, the glowing
embers, which remain. In the same way, as the host
closed in on itself like a flower closing its petals,
certain refractory elements in the universe re-
mained behind, outside it, in the exterior darkness.
There was indeed still something which lit them,
but it was a heart of perverted light, corrosive, poi-
sonous; these rebellious elements binned like
torches or glowed red like embers.

"I heard then the Ave verum being sung.

Christ in the World of Matter 45

The white host was enclosed once again in the
golden monstrance; around it candles were burn-
ing, stabbing the darkness, and here and there
the sanctuary lamps threw out their crimson glow."

The Pyx

As I listened to my friend my heart began to burn
within me and my mind awoke to a new and higher
vision of things. I began to realize vaguely that the
multiplicity of evolutions into which the world
process seems to us to be split up is in fact funda-
mentally the working out of one single great mys-
tery; and this first glimpse of light caused me, I
know not why, to tremble in the depths of my soul.
But I was so accustomed to separating reality into
different planes and categories of thought that I
soon found myself lost in this spectacle, still new
and strange to my tyro mind, of a cosmos in which
the dimensions of divine reality, of spirit, and of
matter were also intimately mingled

Seeing that I was waiting anxiously for further
enlightenment, my friend went on:

"The last story I would like to tell you concerns
an experience which happened to me just recently.
This time, as you 11 see, it was not a question of vi-
sion properly so called: it was a more general im-
pression which affected, and still affects, my whole
being.

"This is what happened.

"At that time my regiment was in line on the
Avocourt plateau. The German attack on Verdun
was still going on, and fighting was heavy on this

46 Hymn of the Universe

side of the Mease, So, like many priests during bat-
tle, I was carrying on me the eucharistic Species in
a little pyx shaped like a watch.

"One morning, when there was an almost com-
plete lull in the trenches, I went down into my dug-
out and there, as I withdrew into a sort of medita-
tion, my thoughts very naturally turned to the
treasure I was carrying on me, with nothing but the
thin gilt of the pyx between it and my breast. Many
times already I had derived joy and sustenance
from the fact of this divine presence. But this time
a new idea dawned on me, which soon drove out
all other preoccupations whether of recollection or
of adoration: I suddenly realized just how extraor-
dinary and how disappointing it was to be thus
holding so close to oneself the wealth of the world
and the very source of life without being able to
possess it inwardly, without being able either to
penetrate it ox to assimilate it. How could Christ be
at once so close to my heart and so far from it, so
closely united to my body and so remote from my
soul?

"I had the feeling that an intangible but invinci-
ble barrier separated me from him with whom
nevertheless I could hardly be in closer contact
since I was holding him in my hands. I fretted at
the thought of holding Happiness in a sealed
receptacle. I was reminded of a bee buzzing round
a pot filled with nectar but tightly closed. And im-
patiently I pressed the pyx against me, as though
this instinctive action could cause Christ to enter
more deeply into me. Finally, feeling I could not
continue thus any longer, and it being now the

Christ in the World of Matter 47

hour when I usually said Mass when things were
quiet, I opened the pyx and gave myself Holy
Communion.

a But now it seemed to me that in the depths of
my being, though the Bread I had just eaten had
become flesh of my flesh, nevertheless it remained
outside of me.

"I then summoned to my aid all my powers of
recollection. I concentrated on the divine particle,
the deepening silence and mounting love of my
mind and heart. I made myself limitlessly humble,
as docile and tractable as a child, so as not. to run
counter in any way to the least desires of my heav-
enly guest but to make myself indistinguishable
from him, and through my submission to him, to
become one with the members of the physical
organism which his soul so completely directed. I
went on and on without respite trying to purify my
heart so as to make my inmost being ever more
transparent to the light which I was sheltering
within me.

"Vain yet blessed attempt!

"Still the host seemed to be always ahead of me,
always further on in a more complete concentration
and opening out of my desires, further on in a
greater permeability of my being to the divine in-
fluences, further on in a more absolute limpidity of
my affective powers. By my withdrawal into myself
and my continual purification of my being I was
penetrating ever more deeply into it: but I was like
a stone that rolls down a precipice without ever
reaching the bottom. Tiny though the host was, I
was losing myself in it without ever being able to

48 Hymn of the Universe

grasp it or to coincide with it: its center was reced-
ing from me as it drew me on.

"Since I could never reach the inmost depths of
the host, it struck me that I might at least manage
to grasp it by its whole surface. For that surface
was very smooth and very small. I tried therefore
to coincide with it externally, to correspond exactly
to its contours.

"But there a new infinity awaited me; which
dashed my hopes.

"When I tried to envelope the sacred particle in
my love, so jealously that I clung to it without los-
ing an atom's breadth of precious content with it,
what happened was, in effect, that each touch pro-
duced a new differentiation, a new complexity, so
that each time I thought to have encompassed it I
found that what I was holding was not the host at
all but one or other of the thousand entities which
make up our lives: a suffering, a joy, a task, a friend
to love or to console. . • •

"Thus, in the depths of my heart, through a mar-
velous substitution, the host was eluding me by
means of its own surface, and leaving me at grips
with the entire universe which had reconstituted it-
self and drawn itself forth from its sensible appear-
ances.

"I will not dwell on the feeling of rapture
produced in me by this revelation of the universe
placed between Christ and myself like a magnifi-
cent prey. I will only say, returning to that special
impression of "exteriority" which had initiated the
vision, that I now understood the nature of the in-
visible barrier which stood between the pyx and

Christ in the World of Matter 49

myself. From the host which I held in my fingers I
was separated by the full extent and the density of
the years which still remained to me, to be lived
and to be divinized."

"Here my friend hesitated a moment. Then he
added:

"I don't know why it is, but for some time now
I have had the impression, as I hold the host in my
hands, that between it and me there remains only a
thin, barely-formed film, « « o

"I had always," he went on, "been by tempera-
ment a 'pantheist/ * I had always felt the pan-
theist's yearnings to be native to me and unargua-
ble; but had never dared give full rein to them
because I could not see how to reconcile them with
my faith. Now, since these various experiences
(and others as well) I can affirm that I have found
my interest in my existence inexhaustible, and my
peace indestructible.

"I live at the heart of a single, unique Element,
the Center of the universe and present in each part
of it: personal Love and cosmic Power.

"To attain to him and become merged into his

• Taking "pantheism" in a very real sense, indeed in the ety-
mological sense of the word (En pasi panta Theos, i.e.» in
St Paul's phrase, God "all in all") but at the same time in
an absolutely legitimate sense: for if in the last resort Chris-
tians become "one with God" this unity is achieved not by
way of identification, God becoming all things, but by the
action — at once differentiating and unifying-— of love, God
being all in all, which latter concept is strictly in accord
with Christian orthodoxy. (Author's note.)

50 Hymn of the Universe

life I have before me the entire universe with its
noble struggles, its impassioned quests, its myriads
of souls to be healed and made perfect I can and I
must throw myself into the thick of human en-
deavor, and with no stopping for breath. For the
more fully I play my part and the more I bring my
efforts to bear on the whole surf ace of reality, the
more also will I attain to Christ and cling close to
him.

"God, who is eternal Being-in-itself, is, one might
say, everywhere in process of formation for us.

"And God is also the heart of everything; so
much so that the vast setting of the universe might
be engulfed or wither away or be taken from me by
death without my joy being diminished. Were crea-
tion's dust, which is vitalized by a halo of energy
and glory, to be swept away, the substantial Reality
wherein every perfection is incorruptibly contained,
and possessed would remain intact: the rays would
be drawn back into their Source, and there I should
still hold them all in a close embrace.

"This is why even war does not disconcert me. In
a few days' time we shall be thrown into battle for
the recapture of Douaumont: a grandiose, almost a
fantastic exploit which will mark and symbolize a
definitive advance of the world in the liberation of
souls. And I tell you this: I shall go into this en-
gagement in a religious spirit, with all my soul,
borne on by a single great impetus in which I am
unable to distinguish where human emotions end
and adoration begins.

"And if I am destined not to return from those
heights I would like my body to remain there,

Christ in the World of Matter 51

molded into the clay of the fortifications, like a liv-
ing cement thrown by God into the stonework of
the New City."

Thus my dear friend spoke to me, one October
evening: he whose soul was instinctively in com-
munion with the life, the one life, of all reality and
whose body rests now, as he wished, somewhere m
the wild countryside around Thiaumont *

Written before the Douaumont engagement
( Nant-le-Grand, October 14, 1916 )

* Thiaumont, a farm near Douaumont. (Ed. note.)

THE SPIMTUAL POWER
OF MATTER

0&i

^3#

And as they went on walking and talking together, be-
hold a fiery chariot and fiery horses parted them both
asunder; and of a sudden Elias was caught up by a
whirlwind into heaven.

THE BOOK OF KINGS

The man was walking in the desert, followed by his
companion, when the Thing swooped down on
him.

From afar it had appeared to him, quite small,
gliding over the sand, no bigger than the palm of a
child's hand— as a pale, fleeting shadow like a wa-
vering flight of quail over the blue sea before sun-
rise or a cloud of gnats dancing in the sun at eve-
ning or a whirlwind of dust at midday sweeping
over the plain.

The Thing seemed to take no heed of the two
travelers, and was roaming capriciously through
the wilderness. Then, suddenly, it assumed a set
course and with the speed of an arrow came
straight at them.

And then the man perceived that the little pale
cloud of vapor was but the center of an infinitely
greater reality moving towards them without re-
striction, formless, boundless. The Thing as it ap-
proached them spread outwards with prodigious
rapidity as far as his eye could reach, filling the
whole of space, while its feet brushed lightly over

56 Hymn of the Universe

the thorny vegetation beside the torrent, its brow
rose in the sky like a golden mist with the redden-
ing sxm behind it. And all about it the ether had be-
come alive, vibrating palpably beneath the crude
substance of rocks and plants as in summer the
landscape quivers behind the overheated soil in the
foreground.

What was advancing towards them was the mov-
ing heart of an immeasurable pervasive subtlety.

The man fell prostrate to the ground; and hiding
his face in his hands he waited

A great silence fell around him.

Then, suddenly, a breath of scorching air passed
across his forehead, broke through the barrier of
his closed eyelids, and penetrated his soul. The
man felt that he was ceasing to be merely himself;
an irresistible rapture took possession of him as
though all the sap of all living things, flowing at
one and the same moment into the too narrow
confines of his heart, was mightily refashioning the
enfeebled fibers of his being. And at the same time
the anguish of some superhuman peril oppressed
him, a confused feeling that the force which had
swept down upon him was equivocal, turbid, the
combined essence of all evil and all goodness.

The hurricane was within himself.

And now, in the very depths of the being it had
invaded, the tempest of life, infinitely gentle, infi-
nitely brutal, was murmuring to the one secret
point in the soul which it had not altogether
demolished:

"You called me: here I am. Driven by the Spirit

r-

The Spiritual Power of Matter 57

far from humanity's caravan routes, you dared to
venture into the untouched M&lderness; grown
weary of abstractions, of attentuations, of the
wordiness of social life, you wanted to pit yourself
against Reality entire and untamed

"You had need of me in order to grow; and I was
waiting for you in order to be made holy.

"Always you have, without knowing it, desired
me; and always I have been drawing you to me.

"And now I am established on you for life, or for
death. You can never go back, never return to com-
monplace gratifications or untroubled worship. He
who has once seen me can never forget me: he
must either damn himself with me or save me with
himself.

"Are you coming?"

"O you who are divine and mighty, what is your
name? Speak."

"I am the fire that consumes and the water that
overthrows; I am the love that initiates and the
truth that passes away. All that compels accept-
ance and all that brings renewal; all that breaks
apart and all that binds together; power, experi-
ment, progress — matter: all this am I.

"Because in my violence I sometimes slay my
lovers; because he who touches me never knows
what power he is unleashing, wise men fear me and
curse me. They speak of me with scorn, calling me
beggar-woman or witch or harlot; but their words
are at variance with life, and the Pharisees who
condemn me, waste away in the outlook to which
they confine themselves; they die of inanition and

58 Hymn of the Universe

their disciples desert them because I am the essence
of all that is tangible, and men cannot do without
me.

"You who have grasped that the world — the
world beloved of God — has, even more than indi-
viduals, a soul to be redeemed,* lay your whole
being wide open to my inspiration, and receive the
spirit of the earth which is to be saved.

'The supreme key to the enigma, the dazzling ut-
terance which is inscribed on my brow and which
henceforth will burn into your eyes even though
you close them, is this: Nothing is precious save
what is yourself in others and others in yourself. In
heaven, all things are but one. In heaven all is one.

"Come, do you not feel my breath uprooting you
and carrying you away? Up, man of God, and make
haste. For according to the way a man surrenders
himself to it, the whirlwind will either drag him
down into the darkness of its depths or lift him up
into the blue skies. Your salvation and mine hang
on this first moment."

"O you who are matters my heart, as you see, is
trembling. Since it is you, tell me: what would you
have me do?"

Take up your arms, O Israel, and do battle
boldly against me."

The wind, having at first penetrated and per-
vaded him stealthily, like a philter, had now be-
come aggressive, hostile.

* The soul of the pleroma, i.e. of the consummation, in
Christ, of the travail of creation; cf . The Future of Man, p.
308. (Ed. note.)

The Spiritual Power of Matter 59

From within its coils it exhaled now the acrid
stench of battle. - r ..

The musky smell of forests, the feverish atmos-
phere of cities, the sinister, heady scent that rises
up from nations locked in battle: all this writihed
within its folds, a vapor gathered from the four cor-
ners of the earth.

The man, still prostrate, suddenly started, as
though his flesh had felt the spur: he leapt to his
feet and stood erect, facing the storm.

It was the soul of his entire race that had shud-
dered within him: an obscure memory of a first
sudden awakening in the midst of beasts stronger,
better-armed than he; a sad echo of the long strug-
gle to tame the corn and to master the fire; a ran-
corous dread of the maleficent forces of nature, a
lust for knowledge and possession. . . *

A moment ago, in the sweetness of the first con-
tactj he had instinctively longed to lose himself in
the warm wind which enfolded him.

Now, this wave of bjiss in which he had all but
melted away was changed into a ruthless determi-
nation towards increased being.

The man had scented the enemy, his hereditary
quarry.

He dug his feet into the ground, and began his
battle.

He fought first of all in order not to be swept
away; but then he began to fight for the joy of
fighting, the joy of feeling his own strength. And
the longer he fought, the more he felt an increase
of strength going out from him to balance the
strength of the tempest, and from the tempest there

60 Hymn of the Universe

came forth in return a new exhalation which flowed
like fire into his veins.

As on certain nights the sea around a swimmer
will grow luminous, and its eddies will glisten the
more brightly under the sturdy threshing of his
limbs, so the dark power wrestling with the man
was lit up with a thousand sparkling lights under
the impact of his onslaught

In a reciprocal awakening of their opposed pow-
ers, he stirred up his utmost strength to achieve the
mastery over it, while it revealed all its treasures in
order to surrender them to him,

"Son of earth, steep yourself in the sea of matter,
bathe in its fiery waters, for it is the source of your
life and your youthfulness.

"You thought you could do without it because
the power of thought has been kindled in you? You
hoped that the more thoroughly you rejected the
tangible, the closer you would be to spirit: that you
would be more divine if you lived in the world of
pure thought, or at least more angelic if you fled
the corporeal? Well, you were like to have perished
of hunger*

"You must have oil for your limbs, blood for your
veins, water for your soul, the world of reality for
your intellect: do you not see that the very law of
your own nature makes these a necessity for you?

"Never, if you work to live and to grow, never
will you be able to say to matter, "I have seen
enough of you; I have surveyed your mysteries and
have taken from them enough food for my thought
to last me for ever." I tell you: even though, like

The Spiritual Power of Matter 61

the Sage of sages, you carried in your memory the
image of all the beings that people the earth or
swim in the seas, still all that knowledge would be
as nothing for your soul, for all abstract knowledge
is only a faded reality: this is because to under-
stand the world knowledge is not enough, you must
see it, touch it, live in its presence and drink the
vital heat of existence in the very heart of reality.

"Never say, then, as some say: "The kingdom of
matter is worn out, matter is dead"? till the very
end of time matter will always remain young, exu-
berant, sparkling, newborn for those who are will-
ing.

"Never say, ^Matter is accursed, matter is evil':
for there has come one who said, *You will drink
poisonous draughts and they shall not harm you,*
and again, TLife shall spring forth out of death,'
and then finally, the words which spell my
definitive liberation, This is my body/

"Purity does not lie in separation from, but in a
deeper penetration into the universe. It is to be
f ound in the love of that unique, boundless Essence
which penetrates the inmost depths of all things
and there, from within those depths, deeper than
the mortal zone where individuals and multitudes
struggle, works upon them and molds them. Purity
lies in a chaste contact with that which is 'the same
in all/

"Oh, the beauty of spirit as it rises up adorned
with all the riches of the earth!

"Son of man, bathe yourself in the ocean of mat-
ter; plunge into it where it is deepest and most vio-
lent; struggle in its currents and drink of its waters.

62 Hymn of the Universe

For it cradled you long ago in your preconscious
existence; and it is that ocean that will raise you up
toGod."

Standing amidst the tempest, the man turned his
head, looking for his companion.

And in that same moment he perceived a strange
metamorphosis: the earth was simultaneously van-
ishing away yet growing in size.

It was vanishing away, for here, immediately be-
neath him, the meaningless variations in the terrain
were diminishing and dissolving; on the otter hand
it was growing ever greater, for there in the dis-
tance the curve of the horizon was climbing cease-
lessly higher.

The man saw himself standing in the center of an
immense cup, the rim of which was closing over
him.

And then the frenzy of battle gave place in his
heart to an irresistible longing to submit: and in a
flash he discovered, everywhere present around
him, the one thing necessary.

Once and for all he understood that, like the
atom, man has no value save for that part of him-
self which passes into the universe. He recognized
with absolute certainty the empty fragility of even
the noblest theorizings as compared with the defini-
tive plenitude of the smallest fact grasped in its
total, concrete reality.

He saw before his eyes, revealed with pitiless
clarity, the ridiculous pretentiousness of human
claims to order the life of the world, to impose on

The Spiritual Power of Matter 63

the world the dogmas, the standards, the conven-
tions of man.

He tasted, sickeningly, the triteness of men's joys
and sorrows, the mean egoism of their pursuits, the
insipidity of their passions, the attenuation of their
power to feel.

He felt pity for those who take fright at the span
of a century or whose love is bounded by the fronr
tiers of a nation.

So many things which once had distressed or re-
volted him — the speeches and pronouncements of
the learned, their assertions and their prohibitions,
their refusal to allow the universe to move — all
seemed to him now merely ridiculous, nonexistent,
compared with the majestic reality, the flood of en-
ergy, which now revealed itself to him: ominpres-
ent, unalterable in its truth, relentless in its devel-
opment, untouchable in its serenity, maternal and
unfailing in its protectiveness.

Thus at long last he had found a point (Fapput,
he had found refuge, outside the confines of human
society.

A heavy cloak slipped from his shoulders and fell
to the ground behind him: the dead weight of all
that is false, narrow, tyrannical, all that is artifi-
cially contrived, all that is merely human in human-
fly.

A wave of triumph freed his soul.

And he felt that henceforth nothing in the world
would ever be able to alienate his heart from the
great reality which was now revealing itself to him,
nothing at all: neither the intrusiveness and indi-

64 Hymn of the Universe

vidualist separatism of human beings (for these
qualities in them he despised) nor the heavens and
the earth in their height and breadth and depth
and power (for it was precisely to these that he
was now dedicating himself for ever ) .

A deep process of renewal had taken place
within him: now it would never again be possible
for him to be human save on another plane. Were
he to descend again now to the everyday life of
earth — even though it were to rejoin his faithful
companion, still prostrate over there on the desert
sand — he would henceforth be for ever a stranger.

Yes, of this he was certain: even for his brothers
in God, better men than he, he would inevitably
speak henceforth in an incomprehensible tongue,
he whom the Lord had drawn to follow the road of
fire. Even for those he loved the most his love
would be henceforth a burden, for they would
sense his compulsion to be for ever seeking some-
thing behind themselves.

Because matter, throwing off its veil of restless
movement and multiplicity, had revealed to him its
glorious unity, chaos now divided him from other
men. Because it had for ever withdrawn his heart
from all that is merely local or individual, all that is
fragmentary, henceforth for him it alone in its total-
ity would be his father and mother, his family, his
race, his unique, consuming passion.

And not a soul in the world could do anything to
change this.

Turning his eyes resolutely away from what was
receding from him, he surrendered himself, in

The Spiritual Power of Matter 65

super-abounding faith, to the wind which was
sweeping the universe onwards.

And now in the heart of the whirling cloud a
light was growing, a light in which there was the
tenderness and the mobility of a human glance;
and from it there spread a warmth which was not
now like the harsh heat radiating from a furnace but
like the opulent warmth which emanates from a
human body. What had been a blind and feral im-
mensity was now becoming expressive and per-
sonal; and its hitherto amorphous expanses were
being molded into features of an ineffable face.

A Being was taking form in the totality of space;
a Being with the attractive power of a soul, pal-
pable like a body, vast as the sky; a Being which
mingled with things yet remained distinct from
them; a Being of a higher order than the substance
of things with which it was adorned, yet taking
shape within them.

The rising Sun was being born in the heart of the
world.

God was shining forth from the summit of that
world of matter whose waves were carrying up to
him the world of spirit.

The man fell to his knees in the fiery chariot
which was bearing him away.

And he spoke these words:

Hymn to Matter

"Blessed be you, harsh matter, barren soil, stubborn
rock: you who yield only to violence, you who
force us to work if we would eat.

66 Hymn of the Universe

^Blessed be you, perilous matter, violent sea, un-
tameable passion: you who unless we fetter you
will devour us.

"Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible
march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who,
by constantly shattering our mental categories,
force us to go ever further and further in our pur-
suit of the truth.

"Blessed be you, universal matter, immeasurable
time, boundless ether, triple abyss of stars and
atoms and generations: you who t>y overflowing
and dissolving our narrow standards or measure-
ment reveal to us the dimensions of God.

"Blessed be you, impenetrable matter: you who,
interposed between our minds and the world of es-
sences, cause us to languish with the desire to
pierce through the seamless veil of phenomena.

"Blessed be you, mortal matter: you who one day
will undergo the process of dissolution within us
and will thereby take us forcibly into the very heart
of that which exists.

"Without you, without your onslaughts, without
your uprootings of us, we should remain all our
lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of our-
selves and of God. You who batter us and then
dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to
us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and
liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the
flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless.

"I bless you, matter, and you I acclaim: not as
the pontiffs of science or the moralizing preachers
depict you, debased, disfigured — a mass of brute
forces and base appetites — but as you reveal your-

The Spiritual Power of Matter 67

self to me today, in your totality and your true
nature.

"You I acclaim as the inexhaustible potentiality
for existence and transformation wherein the pre-
destined substance germinates and grows.

"I acclaim you as the universal power which
brings together and unites, through which the mul-
titudinous monads are bound together and in
which they all converge on the way of the spirit.

"I acclaim you as die melodious fountain of
water whence spring the souls of men* and as the
limpid crystal whereof is fashioned the new Jerusa-
lem.

"I acclaim you as the divine milieu, charged with
creative power, as the ocean stirred by the Spirit, as
the clay molded and infused with life by the incar-
nate Word.

"Sometimes, thinking they are responding to your
irresistible appeal, men will hurl themselves for
love of you into the exterior abyss of selfish pleas-
ure-seeking: they are deceived by a reflection or by
an echo.

"This I now understand.

If we are ever to reach you, matter, we must,
having first established contact with the totality of
all that lives and moves here below, come little by

* If the work of creation is seen as an evolutionary process,
then existence of matter is the necessary precondition for the
appearance, on earth, of spirit: elsewhere Pere Teilhard de
Chardin speaks of matter in more exact language as the
"matrix of spirit": that in which life emerges and is sup-
ported, not the active principle from which it takes its rise.
(Ed. note.)

68 Hymn of the Universe

little to feel that the individual shapes of all we
have laid hold on are melting away in our hands,
until finally we are at grips with the single essence
of all subsistences and all unions.

"If we are ever to possess you, having taken you
rapturously in our arms, we must then go on to
sublimate you through sorrow.

"Your realm comprises those serene heights
where saints think to avoid you— but where your
flesh is so transparent and so agile as to be no
longer distinguishable from spirit

"Raise me up then, matter, to those heights,
through struggle and separation and death; raise
me up until, at long last, it becomes possible for me
in perfect chastity to embrace the universe/' *

* It must be made quite clear that he who, not on the
fringe of the Christian mystical tradition but at its point of
fullest development, was able without imprudence to engage
in this formidable battle with matter had prepared himself
for it by the most rigorous asceticism: first, in childhood and
youth, the asceticism of an unwavering fidelity to the Chris-
tian ideal; later, that of a careful and constant obedience to
the exigencies of a vocation which would lead him on with-
out respite up the steeply climbing road to perfection till he
came to that solitude which he himself described: "he would
henceforth be for ever a stranger .-..-.', he would inevitably
speak henceforth in an incomprehensible tongue, he whom
the Lord had drawn to follow the road of fire." And else-
where he wrote: "It seems to me that the point of origin of
this invasion and envelopment of my being was the rapidly
increasing importance which the sense of God's will was as-
suming in my spiritual life." (Le Coeur de la Matidre.)

There was need of that long, heroic journey through the
mystical dark night, and of an exceptional development of
the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, before mat-
ter could become "diaphanous" to Pere Teilhard's eyes and

The Spiritual Power of Matter 68

Down below on the desert sands, now tranquil
again, someone was weeping and calling out: "My
Father, my Father! What wild wind can this he
that has borne him away?"

And on the ground there lay a cloak.

Jersey, 8th August 1919

could reveal to him within itself not only the hallowing
stream which flows from the Incarnation and the Eucharist
but also the radiant presence of Christ

For an exact understanding of the Hymn to Matter, there-
fore, we must place it at the end of the way of purgation and
looking on and up to the mountaintop where the heavenly
Jerusalem shines forth.

It follows that an inexperienced Christian would be mak-
ing a dangerous mistake if he thought to follow in Pere Teil-
hard's footsteps without first of all treading, like him, the
traditional paths of asceticsm. (Ed note.)

PENSEES

In cordis

jubilo

Christum

natum

adoremus

cum novo

cantico

THE PRESENCE OF GOD
IN THE WORLD*

Let us prays

Lord Jesus Christ, you truly contain within your
gentleness, within your humanity, all the unyield-
ing immensity and grandeur of the world. And it is
because of this, it is because there exists in you this
ineffable synthesis of what our human thought and
experience would never have dared join together in
order to adore them — element and totality, the one
and the many, mind and matter, the infinite and the
personal; it is because of the indefinable contours
which this complexity gives to your appearance
and to your activity, that my heart, enamoured of
cosmic reality, gives itself passionately to you.

I love you, Lord Jesus, because of the multitude
who shelter within you and whom, if one clings
closely to you, one can hear with all the other
beings murmuring, praying, weeping. . . .

I love you because of the transcendent and inex-
orable fixity of your purposes, which causes your
gentle friendship to be colored by an intransigent

• Selected by Fernande Tardivel from Pere Teilhard's pub-
lished and unpublished works.

74 Hymn of the Universe

determinism and to gather us all ruthlessly into the
folds of its will.

I love you as the source, the activating and life-
giving ambience, the term and consummation, of
flie world, even of the natural world, and of its
process of becoming.

You the Center at which all things meet and
which stretches out over all things so as to draw
them back into itself: I love you for the extensions
of your body and soul to the farthest corners of cre-
ation through grace, through life, and through
matter.

Lord Jesus, you who are as gentle as the human
heart, as fiery as the forces of nature, as intimate as
life itself, you in whom I can melt away and with
whom I must have mastery and freedom: I love
you as a world, as this world which has captivated
my heart; — and it is you, I now realize, that my
brother-men, even those who do not believe, sense
and seek throughout the magic immensities of the
cosmos.

Lord Jesus, you are the center toward which all
things are moving: if it be possible, make a place
for us all in the company of those elect and holy
ones whom your loving care has liberated one by
one from the chaos of our present existence and
who now are being slowly incorporated into you in
the unity of the new earth.

2

The prodigious expanses of time which preceded
the first Christmas were not empty of Christ: they

Pensies 75

were imbued with the influx of his power. It was
the ferment of his conception that stirred up the
cosmic masses and directed the initial develop-
ments of the biosphere. It was the travail preceding
his birth that accelerated the development of in-
stinct and the birth of thought upon the earth. Let
us have done with the stupidity which makes a
stumbling-block of the endless eras of expectancy
imposed on us by the Messiah; the fearful, anony-
mous labors of primitive man, the beauty fashioned
through its age-long history by ancient Egypt, the
anxious expectancies of Israel, the patient distilling
of the attar of Oriental mysticism, the endless
refining of wisdom by the Greeks: all these were
needed before the Flower could blossom on the rod
of Jesse and of all humanity. All these preparatory
processes were cosmically and biologically neces-
sary that Christ might set foot upon our human
stage. And all this labor was set in motion
by the active, creative awakening of his soul inas-
much as that human soul had been chosen to
breathe life into the universe. When Christ first
appeared before men in the arms of Mary he had
already stirred up the world.

Like a river which, as you trace it back to its
source, gradually diminishes till in the end it is lost
altogether in the mud from which it springs, so ex-
istence becomes attenuated and finally vanishes
away when we try to divide it up more and more
minutely in space or — what comes to the same — to

76 Hymn of the Universe

drive it further and further back in time. The gran-
deur of the river is revealed not at its source but at
its estuary. In the same way man's secret is to be
sought not in the long-outgrown stages of his em-
bryonic life, whether individual or racial, but in the
spiritual nature of his soul. Now this soul, whose
activity is always a synthesis, in itself eludes the in-
vestigations of science, the essential concern of
which is to analyze things into their elements and
their material antecedents; it can be discovered
only by inward vision and philosophic reflection.

Those thinkers are absolutely mistaken, there-
fore, who imagine they can prove man s nature to
be purely material simply by uncovering ever
deeper and more numerous roots of his being in the
earth. Far from annihilating spirit, they merely
show how it mingles with and acts upon the world
of matter like a leaven. Let us not play their game
by supposing as they do that for a being to come
from heaven we must know nothing of the earthly
conditions of his origin.

4

When your presence, Lord, has flooded me with its
light I hoped that within in it I might find ultimate
reality at its most tangible.

But now that I have in fact laid hold on you, you
who are utter consistency, and feel myself borne by
you, I realize that my deepest hidden desire was
not to possess you but to be possessed.

It is not as a radiation of light nor as subtilized
matter that I desire you; nor was it thus that I de-

PensSes 77

scribed you in my first intuitive encounter with
you: it was as fire. And I can see I shall have no
rest unless an active influence, coming forth from
you, bears down on me to transform me.

The whole universe is aflame.

Let the starry immensities therefore expand into
an ever more prodigious repositoiy of assembled
suns;

let the light-rays prolong indefinitely, at each end
of the spectrum, the range of their hues and their
penetrative power;

let life draw from yet more distant sources the
sap which flows through its innumerable branches;

and let us go on and on endlessly increasing our
perception of the hidden powers that slumber, and
the infinitesimally tiny ones that swarm about us,
and the immensities that escape us because they
appear to us simply as a point.

From all these discoveries, each of which plunges
him a little deeper into the ocean of energy, the
mystic derives an unalloyed delight, and his thirst
for them is unquenchable; for he will never feel
himself sufficiently dominated by the powers of the
earth and the skies to be brought under God's yoke
as completely as he would wish.

It is in fact God, God alone, who through his
Spirit stirs up into a ferment the mass of the uni-
verse.

A limpid sound rises amidst the silence; a trail of
pure color drifts through the glass; a light glows for

78 Hymn of the Universe

a moment in the depths of the eyes I love.

Three things, tiny, fugitive: a song, a sunbeam, a
glance.

So, at first, I thought they had entered into me in
order to remain there and be lost in me.

On the contrary: they took possession of me, and
bore me away.

For if this plaint of the air, this tinting of the
light, this communication of a soul were so tenuous
and so fleeting it was only that they might pene-
trate the more deeply into my being, might pierce
through to that final depth where all the faculties
of man are so closely bound together as to become
a single point Through the sharp tips of the three
arrows which had pierced me the world itself had
invaded my being and had drawn me back into
itself.

We imagine that in our sense-perceptions exter-
nal reality humbly presents itself to us in order to
serve us, to help in the building up of our integrity.
But this is merely the surface of the mystery of
knowledge; the deeper truth is that when the world
reveals itself to us it draws us into itself: it causes
us to flow outwards into something belonging to it
everywhere present in it and more perfect than it.

The man who is wholly taken up with the de-
mands of everyday living or whose sole interest is
in the outward appearances of things seldom gains
more than a glimpse, at best, of this second phase
in our sense-perceptions, that in which the world,
having entered into us, then withdraws from us and
bears us away with it: he can have only a very dim
awareness of that aureole, thrilling and inundating

Pensies 79

our being, through which is disclosed to us at every
point of contact the unique essence of the universe.

6

Like those materialistic biologists who think they
can do away with the soul by dismantling the
physico-chemical mechanisms of the living cell,
zoologists are persuaded they have done away with
the necessity for a first Cause simply because they
have discovered a little more about the general
structure of his work. It is time we set aside once
and for all a problem so invalidly stated. No;
strictly speaking, scientific transformism can prove
nothing for or against the existence of God. It sim-
ply establishes as a fact the concatenation of real-
ity. It offers us an anatomy of life, not an ultimate
explanation of life. It affirms that something has
become organism, something has developed; but to
discern the ultimate conditions of that development
is beyond its competence. To decide whether the
evolutionary process is self-explanatory or whether
it demands for its explanation a progressive and
continuous act of creation on the part of a first
Mover: this falls within the domain not of physics
but of metaphysics.

The theory of transformism, it must be said again
and again, does not of itself involve the acceptance
of any particular philosophy. Does that mean that
it offers no hint in favor of one rather tiian another?
No, indeed. But it is interesting to note that the sys-
tems of thought which are best adapted to it would
seem to be precisely those which at first regarded it

80 Hymn of the Universe

as a menace to them. Christianity, for example, is
essentially based on the twofold belief that man is
in a special sense an object of pursuit to the divine
power throughout creation, and that Christ is the
terminal point at which, supernaturally but also
physically, the consummation of humanity is des-
tined to be achieved. Could one desire an
experiential view of things more in keeping with
these doctrines of unity than that which shows us
living beings, not artificially set side by side in pur-
suit of some doubtful utility or amenity, but bound
together by virtue of the physical conditions of
their existence, in the real unity of a shared strug-
gle towards greater being?

7

Where at first glance we could see only an incoher-
ent arrangement of different altitudes, of land-
masses and of waters, there we later established a
solid network of real relationships: we animated
the earth by communicating to it something of our
own unity.

And now, through a gushing forth of vitality in
the reverse direction, this life infused by the human
mind into the greatest material mass with which we
have contact tends to flow back into us under a
new guise. When, through our vision of it, we have
endowed our earth of iron and stone with "person-
ality," then we find ourselves infected by the desire
to build for ourselves in our turn, out of the sum
total of all our souls, a spiritual edifice as vast as
the one we contemplate, the one brought forth out

Pensfas 81

of the travail of the geogenetic processes. Around
the sphere of the earth's rock-mass there stretches a
real layer of animated matter, the layer of living
creatures and human beings, the biosphere. The
great educative value of geology consists in the fact
that by disclosing to us an earth which is truly one,
an earth which is in fact but a single body since it
has a face, it recalls to us the possibilities of estab-
lishing higher and higher degrees of organic unity
in the zone of thought which envelops the world
In truth it is impossible to keep one's gaze con-
stantly fixed on the vast horizons opened out to us
by science without feeling the stirrings of an ob-
scure desire to see men drawn closer and closer to-
gether by an ever-increasing knowledge and sym-
pathy until finally, in obedience to some divine
attraction, there remains but one heart and one soul
on the face of the earth.

8

Because of the fundamental unity of the world,
every phenomenon, if it is adequately studied even
though under one single aspect, reveals itself as
being ubiquitous alike in its import and in its roots.
Where does this proposition lead us if we apply it
to human "self-awareness?"

We might have been tempted to say: "Conscious-
ness manifests itself indubitably only in man; there-
fore it is an isolated event of no interest to science."

But no, we must correct this, and say rather:
"Consciousness manifests itself indubitably in man
and therefore, glimpsed in this one flash of light, it

82 Hymn of the Universe

reveals itself as having a cosmic extension and con-
sequently as being aureoled by limitless prolonga-
tions in space and time/'

This conclusion is big with consequences; but I
cannot see how it can be denied if sound analogy
with all the rest of science is to be preserved.

It is a fact beyond question that deep within
ourselves we can discern, as though through a rent,
an "interior' at the heart of things; and this glimpse
is sufficient to force upon us the conviction that in
one degree or another this "interior" exists and has
always existed everywhere in nature. Since at one
particular point in itself, the stuff of the universe
has an inner face, we are forced to conclude that in
its very structure — that is, in every region of space
and time — it has this double aspect, just as, for in-
stance, in its very structure it is granular. In all
things there is a Within, coextensive with their
Without

9

Let us ponder over this basic truth till we are
steeped in it, till it becomes as familiar to us as our
awareness of shapes or our reading of words: God,
at his most vitally active and most incarnate, is not
remote from us, wholly apart from the sphere of
the tangible; on the contrary, at every moment he
awaits us in the activity, the work to be done,
which every moment brings. He is, in a sense, at
the point of my pen, my pick, my paint-brush, my
needle — and my heart and my thought It is by
carrying to its natural completion the stroke, the

PensSes 83

line, the stitch I am working on that I shall lay hold
on that ultimate end toward which my will at its
deepest levels tends. Like those formidable physi-
cal forces which man has so disciplined that they
can be made to carry out operations of amazing
delicacy, so the enormous might of God's magne-
tism is brought to bear on our frail desires,
our tiny objectives, without ever breaking their
point. For it endues us with supervitality; and
therefore introduces into our spiritual life a higher
principle of unity, the specific effect of which can
be seen — according to one's point of view— as ei-
ther to make human endeavor holy or to make the
Christian life fully human,

10

Yes, Lord God, I believe that — and believe all the
more readily since it is a question not merely of my
being consoled but of my being completed — that it
is you who stand at the source of that impulse and
at the end point of that magnetic attraction to
which all my life long I must be docile, obedient to
the initial impulsion and eager to promote its de-
velopments. It is you too who quicken for me by
your omnipresence — far more effectively than my
spirit quickens the matter it animates — the myriad
influences which at every moment bear down upon
me. In the life springing up within me, in the mate-
rial elements that sustain me, it is not just your gifts
that I discern: it is you yourself that I encounter,
you who cause me to share in your own being, and
whose hands mold me. In the initial ordering and

84 Hymn of the Universe

modulating of the life force which is in me, and in
the continuous, helpful action upon me of second*
ary causes, I am in very truth in contact — and the
closest possible contact— with the two aspects of
your creative activity; I encounter and I kiss your
two wonderful hands: the hand that lays hold on us
at so deep a level that it becomes merged, in us,
with the sources of life, and the hand whose grasp
is so immense that under its slightest pressure all
the springs of the universe respond harmoniously
together. Of their very nature those blessed passivi-
ties which are my will to be, my inclination to be
thus or thus, and the chances given me to attain to
my own completion in the way I desire, all are
charged with your influence — an influence which I
shall come before long to see more clearly as the
organizing force of your mystical Body, And if I
would enter into communion with you in these
passivities — a frontal communion, a communion in
the sources of life — I have but to recognize you
within them and to beg you to be ever more and
more fully present in them.

U

The mystic only gradually becomes aware of the
faculty he has been given of perceiving the indefi-
nite fringe of reality surrounding the totality of all
created things, with more intensity than the pre-
cise, individual core of their being.

For a long time, thinking he is the same as other
men, he will try to see as they do, to speak their

PensSes 85

language, to find contentment in the joys with
which they are satisfied.

For a long time, seeking to appease his mysteri-
ous but obsessive need for plenitude of being, he
will try to divert it on to some particularly stable or
precious object to which, among all the accessory
pleasures of life, he will look for the substance and
overflowing richness of his joy.

For a long time he will look to the marvels of art
to provide him with that exaltation which will give
him access to the sphere— his own sphere — of the
extra-personal and the suprasensible; and in the un-
known Word of nature he will strive to hear the
heartbeats of that higher reality which calls him by
name.

Happy the man who fails to stifle his vision.

Happy the man who will not shrink from a pas-
sionate questioning of the Muses and of Cybele
concerning his God.

But happy above all he who, rising beyond es-
thetic dilettantism and the materialism of tie lower
layers of life, is given to hear the reply of all
beings, singly and all together: "What you saw
gliding past, like a world, behind the song and be-
hind the color and behind the eyes* glance does not
exist just here or there but is a Presence existing
equally everywhere: a presence which, though it
now seems vague to your feeble sight, will grow in
clarity and depth. In this presence all diversities
and all impurities yearn to be melted away,"

86 Hymn of the Universe

12

For Christian humanism — faithful in this to the
most firmly established theology of the Incarnation
— there is no real independence or discordance but
a logical subordination between the genesis of hu-
manity in the world and the genesis of Christ,
through his Church, in humanity. Inevitably the
two processes are structurally linked together, the
second needing the first as the material on which it
rests in order to supervitalize it. This point of view
fully respects the progressive experimental concen-
tration of human thought in a more and more lively
awareness of its unifying role; but in place of the
undefined point of converg®nce required as term
for this evolution it is the clearly defined personal
reality of the incarnate Word that is made manifest
to us and established for us as our objective, that
Word "in whom all things subsist"

Life for Man: Man for Christ: Christ for God.

And to ensure the psychic continuity of this vast
development in all its phases, extending to the myr-
iads of elements scattered through the immensities
of all the ages, there is but one mechanism: educa-
tion.

Thus all the lines converge, complete one an-
other, interlock. All things are now but one.

13

) Without any doubt there is something which links
material energy and spiritual energy together and
makes them a continuity. In the last resort there

Pensies 87

must somehow be but one single energy active in
the world. And the first idea that suggests itself to
us is that the soul must be a center of transforma-
tion at which, through all the channels of nature,
corporeal energies come together in order to attain
inwardness and be sublimated in beauty and in
truth.

But however attractive at first sight we may find
this idea of a direct transformation of one of the
two types of energy into the other, a moment's in-
spection will force us to abandon it. For as soon as
we try to couple them together their independence
of one another becomes as evident as their inter-
connection.

"To think, we must eat/* Yes, but what diverse
thoughts may spring from the same crust of bread!
Just as the same letters of an alphabet can be
turned either into nonsense or into the most beauti-
ful of poems, so the same calories seem as indif-
ferent as they are necessary to the spiritual valmes
they nourish.

14

What would become of our souls, Lord, if they
lacked the bread of earthly reality to nourish them,
the wine of created beauty to intoxicate them, the
discipline of human struggle to make them strong?
What puny powers and bloodless hearts your crea-
tures would bring to you were they to cut them-
selves off prematurely from the providential setting
in which you have placed them! Show us, Lord,
how to contemplate the Sphinx without being be-

88 Hymn of the Universe

guiled into error; how to grasp the mystery hidden
here on earth in the womb of death, not by refine-
ments of human learning but in the simple concrete
act of your redemptive immersion in matter.
Through the sufferings of your incarnate life reveal
to us, and then teach us to harness jealousy for
you, the spiritual power of matter.

15

Like those translucent materials which can be
wholly illumined by a light enclosed within them,
the world manifests itself to the Christian mystic as
bathed in an inward light which brings out its
structure, its relief, its depths. This light is. not the
superficial coloring that a crude hedonism might
discern; nor is it the violent glare that annihilates
objects and blinds the eyes; it is the tranquil,
mighty radiance born of the synthesis, in Jesus, of
all the elements of the world. The more completely
the beings thus illumined attain to their natural
fulfillment, the closer and more perceptible this ra-
diance will be; and on the other hand the more per-
ceptible it becomes, the more clearly the contours
of the objects which it bathes will stand out and
the deeper will be their roots.

16

If one considers, however briefly, what conditions
will make possible the flowering in the human
heart of this new universal love, so often vainly

PensSes 89

dreamed of but now at last leaving the realm of the
Utopian and declaring itself as both possible and
necessary, one notices this: that if men on earth, all
over the earth, are ever to love one another it is not
enough for them to recognize in one another the
elements of a single something; they must also, by
developing a "planetary" consciousness, become
aware of the fact that without loss of their individ-
ual identities they are becoming a single somebody*
For there is no total love — and this is writ large in
the gospel — save that which is in and of the per-
sonal.

And what does this mean if not that, in the last
resort, the "planetizatkm" of humanity presupposes
for its proper development not only the contracting
of the earth, not only the organizing and condens-
ing of human thought, but also a third factor: the
rising on our inward horizon of some psychic cos-
mic center, some supreme pole of consciousness,
towards which all the elementary consciousnesses of
the world shall converge and in which they^shall be
able to love one another: in other words, the rising
of a God.

17

At every moment the vast and horrible Thing
breaks in upon us through the crevices and invades
our precarious dwelling place, that Thing^w© try so
hard to forget but which is always there, Separated
from us only by thin dividing walls: fire, pestilence,
earthquake, storm, the unleashing of dark moral

90 Hymn of the Universe

forces, all these sweep away ruthlessly, in an in-
stant, what we had labored with mind and heart to
build up and make beautiful.

Lord God, my dignity as a man forbids me to
shut my eyes to this, like an animal or a child;
therefore, lest I succumb to the temptation t® curse
the universe, and the Maker of the universe, teach
me to adore it by seeing you hidden within it. Say
once again to me, Lord, those great and liberating
words, the words which are at once revealing light
and effective power: hoc est Corpus meum* In
very truth, if only we will it to be so, the immense
and somber Thing, the specter, the tempest — is
you. Ego sum, nolite timere** All the things in life
that fill us with dread, all that filled your own heart
with dismay in the garden of agony: all, in the last
resort, are the species or appearances, the matter,
of one and the same sacrament

We have only to believe; and to believe all the
more firmly, all the more desperately, as the fearful
reality which confronts us appears more menacing
and more invincible. For then, little by little, we
shall see the universal horror lose something of its
rigidity, and begin to smile upon us, and finally
gather us into its super-human arms.

It is not the rigidity of material or mathematical
determinisms that gives the universe its consist-
ency, but the supple orderings of spirit. To those
who believe, the innumerable accidents of chance,

* "This is my Body." (Matt. 26.28; Mark 14.22.)
** "It is I, fear not." (Luke 24.36.)

PensSes 91

the boundless blindness of the world, are but illu-
sion: fides substantia return?

18

Lord, it is you who, through the imperceptible
goadings of sense beauty, penetrated my heart in
order to make its life flow out into yourself. You
came down into me by means of a tiny scrap of cre-
ated reality; and then, suddenly, you unfurled your
immensity before my eyes and displayed yourself
to me as Universal Being.

So the basic mystical intuition issues in the dis-
covery of a suprareal unity diffused throughout the
immensity of the world.

In that milieu, at once divine and cosmic, in which
he had at first observed only a simplification and as
it were a spiritualization of space, the seer, faithful
to the light given him, now perceives the gradual
delineation of the form and attributes of an ulti-
mate element in which all things find their defini-
tive consistency.

And then he begins to measure more exactly the
joys, and the pressing demands, of that mysterious
presence to which he has surrendered himself .

19

Give me to recognize in other men, Lord God, the
radiance of your own face. The irresistible light of

* "Faith is the substance of things to be hoped for/' (Heb.
11J.)

92 Hymn of the Universe

your eyes, shining in the depths of things, has al-
ready driven me into undertaking the work I had
to do and facing the difficulties I had to overcomes
grant me now to see you also and above all in the
most inward, most perfect, most remote levels of
the souls of my brother-men.

The gift you ask of me for these brothers of
mine— the only gift my heart can give them — is not
the overflowing tenderness of those special, prefer-
ential loves which you implant in our lives as the
most powerful created agent of our inward growths
it is something less tender but just as real and of
even greater strength. Your will is that, with the
help of your Eucharist, between men and my
brother-men there should be revealed that basic at-
traction (already dimly felt in every love once it
becomes strong) which mystically transforms the
myriads of rational creatures into (as it were) a
single monad in you, Christ Jesus.

HUMANITY IN PROGRESS

20

The world is abuilding. This is the basic truth
which must first be understood so thoroughly that
it becomes an habitual and as it were natural
springboard for our thinking. At first sight, beings
and their destinies might seem to us to be scattered
haphazard or at least in an arbitrary fashion over
the face of the earth; we could very easily suppose
that each of us might equally well have been born

Pemdes 93

earlier or later, at this place or that, happier or more
ill-starred, as though the universe from the begin-
ning to end of its history formed in space-time a
sort of vast flowerbed in which the flowers could be
changed about at the whim of the gardener. But
this ilea is surely untenable. The more one reflects,
with the help of all that science, philosophy and re-
ligion can teach us, each in its own field, the more
one comes to realize that the world should be lik-
ened not to a bundle of elements artificially held
together but rather to some organic system ani-
mated by a broad movement of development which
is proper to itself. As the centuries go by it seems
that a comprehensive plan is indeed being slowly
carried out around us. A process is at work in the
universe, an issue is at stake, which can best be
compared to the processes of gestation and birth;
the birth of that spiritual reality which is formed
by souls and by such material reality as their
existence involves. Laboriously, through and thanks
to the activity of mankind, the new earth is being
formed and purified and is taking on definition and
clarity. No, we are not like the cut flowers that
make up a bouquet: we are like the leaves and
buds of a great tree on which everything appears at
its proper time and place as required and deter-
mined by the good of the whole.

Human suffering, the sum total of suffering poured
out at each moment over the whole earth, is like an
immeasurable ocean. But what makes up this im-

94 Hymn of the Universe

mensity? Is it blackness, emptiness, barren wastes?
No, indeed: it is potential energy. Suffering holds
hidden within it, in extreme intensity, the ascen-
sional force of the world. The whole point is to set
this force free by making it conscious of what it
signifies and of what it is capable. For if all the sick
people in the world were simultaneously to turn
their sufferings into a single shared longing for the
speedy completion of the kingdom of God through
the conquering and organizing of the earth, what a
vast leap towards God the world would thereby
make! If all those who suffer in the world were to
unite their sufferings so that the pain of the world
should become one single grand act of conscious-
ness, of sublimation, of unification, would not this
be one of the most exalted forms in which the mys-
terious work of creation could be manifested to our
eyes?

22

Lord, that I might hold to you the more closely, I
would that my consciousness were as wide as the
skies and the earth and the peoples of the earth; as
deep as the past, the desert, the ocean; as tenuous
as the atoms of matter or the thoughts of the
human heart.

Must I not adhere to you everywhere throughout
the entire extent of the universe?

In order that I may not succumb to the tempta-
tion that lies in wait for every act of boldness, nor
ever forget that you alone must be sought in and
through everything, I know, Lord, that you will

PensSes 95

send me — at what moments only you know — depri-
vations, disappointments, sorrow. The object of my
love will fall away from me, or I shall outgrow it

The flower I held in my hands withered in my
hands. ...

At the turn of the lane the wall rose up before
me. • • •

Suddenly between the trees I saw the end of the
forest which I thought had no end. . . •

The testing-time had come ...

... But it did not bring me unalleviated sor-
row. On the contrary, a glorious, unsuspected joy
invaded my soul: because, in the collapse of those
immediate supports I had risked giving to my life,
I knew with a unique experiential certainty that I
would never again rely for support on anything
save your own divine stability.

23

The development in our souls of supernatural life
(based on the natural spiritualization of the world
through the efforts of mankind) : this in the last re-
sort is the field where the operative power of faith
is positively and without any known limits exer-
cised.

Within the universe it is spirit, and within spirit
it is the moral sphere, that are par excellence the
actual subjects of the development of life. Conse-
quently it is there, on that plastic center of our-
selves where divine grace mingles with earthly
drives, that the power of faith should be brought
vigorously to bear.

96 Hymn of the Universe

There above all, surely, creative energy awaits
us, ready to work in us a transformation beyond
anything that human eye has seen or ear heard.
Who can say what God would fashion out of us if,
trusting in his word, we dared to follow his coun-
sels to the very end and surrender ourselves to his
providence?

Let us then, for love of our Creator and of the
universe, throw ourselves fearlessly into the cruci-
ble of the world of tomorrow.

In brief, there are three characteristics of the
Christian fulfillment of this process of life develop-
ment, brought about by faith:

first, it is effected without any distortion or dis-
ruption of any particular determinism: for events
are not, in general, deflected from their course of
prayer but are integrated into a new arrangement
of the totality of forces;

secondly, it is manifested, not necessarily on the
plane of natural human achievement, but in the
order of supernatural growth to holiness;

thirdly, in real fact it has God as at once its prin-
cipal agent, its source and its milieu.

With this triple reservation, which marks it off
clearly from natural faith in its mode of operation,
Christian faith can be said to manifest itself as, in
the most realistic and comprehensive sense, a "cos-
mic energy."

24

Within a universe which is structurally convergent
the only possible way for one element to draw

PensSes 97

closer to other, neighboring elements is by condens-
ing the cone: that is, by driving towards the point
of convergence the whole area of the world in
which it is involved. In such a system it is impossi-
ble to love one's neighbor without drawing close
to God — and vice versa for that matter, lids we
know well enough. But it is also impossible— and
this is less familiar to us— to love either God or our
neighbor without being obliged to help in the prog-
ress of the earthly synthesis of spirit in its physical
totality, for it is precisely the advances made in this
movement of synthesis that permit us to draw close
to one another and at the same time raise us up to-
wards God. Thus, because we love, and in order to
love more, we find ourselves happily reduced to
sharing— we more and better than anyone— in all
the struggles, all the anxieties, all the aspirations,
and also all the affections, of the earth in so far as
M these contain within them a principle of ascen-
sion and synthesis.

This breadth of outlook does not involve any
modification whatsoever of Christian poverty of
spirit* But instead of having things behind* it
carries them onwards; instead of cutting down it
raises up: it is a question now not of a breaking
away but of a crossing over, not a flight but an
emergence. Without ceasing to be itself, charity
enlarges its scope to become an upward-lifting
force, a common essence, at the heart of every form

* I have used this phrase to translate d&achement in order
to avoid the infelicitous and possibly gravely misleading
overtones (suggestive of the "couldn't care less" attitude)
of "detachment.*'

98 Hymn of the Universe

of human endeavor, whose diversity tends in conse-
quence to be drawn together in synthesis into the
rich totality of a single operation. Like Christ him-
self and in imitation of him it becomes universal,
dynamic and, for that very reason, fully human.

In short, in order to correspond to the new curve
of the flow, Christianity is led to the discovery,
below God, of earthly values, while humanism is
led to the discovery, above the world, of the place
of a God

25

Joy is above all the fruit of having come face to
face with a universal and enduring reality to which
one can refer and as it were attach those fragmen-
tary moments of happiness that, being successive
and fugitive, excite the heart without satisfying it
The mystic suffers more than other men from the
tendency of created things to crumble into dust: in-
stinctively and obstinately he searches for the sta-
ble, the unfailing, the absolute . . .

This crumbling away, which is the mark of the
corruptible and the precarious, is to be seen every-
where. And yet everywhere there are traces of, and
a yearning for, a unique support, a unique and ab-
solute soul, a unique reality in which other realities
are brought together in synthesis, as stable and uni-
versal as matter, as simple as spirit.

One must have felt deeply the pain of being
plunged into that multiplicity which swirls about
one and slips through one's fingers if one is to be
worthy of experiencing the rapture that transports

PensSes 99

the soul when, through the influence of the univer-
sal Presence, it perceives that reality has become
not merely transparent but solidly enduring. For
this means that the incorruptible principle of the
universe is now and for ever found, and that it ex-
tends everywhere: the world is fitted, and filled
with the Absolute. To see this is to be made free.

26

Mane nobiscum Domine, quoniam advesperascit*

Assimilate, utilize, the shadows of later life: en-
feeblement, loneliness, the sense that no further ho-
rizons lie ahead. . • •

Discover in Christ-Omega** how to remain
young: gay, enthusiastic, full of enterprise.

Beware of thinking that every form of melan-
choly, indifference, disenchantment is to be iden-
tified with wisdom.

Make a place, and an upward-lifting place, for
the end which now draws near and for the decline
of one's powers to whatever degree God may will.

"To be ready" has never seemed to mean any-
thing to me but this : "To be straining f orwards."

*"Stay with us, because it is towards evening." (Luke
24.29.)

** Omega: the end-point of cosmogenesis, the culmination
of the process of hominization or spiritualization, where per-
sonal and universal meet in the Supra-Personal — a point
therefore which is not simply the end of the whole process,
the last term in its series, but is outside all series, autono-
mous and transcendent, and so is identified with God, the
Center of centers, and with the Totus Christus, (Tr. note.)

100 Hymn of the Universe

May Christ-Omega keep me always young— ad
majoremDei gloriam* (And what better argument
for Christianity could there be than an enduring
youthfulness drawn from Christ-Omega?)
For

old age comes from him,

old age leads on to him, and

old age will touch me only in so far as he wills.

To be "young" means to be hopeful, energetic,
smiling— and clear-sighted.

Accept death in whatever guise it may come to
me in Christ-Omega, that is, within the process of
the development of life.

A smile (inward and outward) means facing
with sweetness and gentleness whatever befalls
one.

Jesus-Omega, grant me to serve you, to proclaim
you, to glorify you, to make you manifest, to the
very end, through all the time that remains to me of
life, and above all through my death.

Desperately, Lord Jesus, I commit to your care
my last active years, and my death: do not let them
impair or spoil the work I have so dreamed of
achieving for you.

The grace to end well, in the way that will best
advance the glory of Christ-Omega: this is the
grace of graces.

Live under the exclusive dominance of a single
passion: the impassioned desire to help forward the
synthesis of Christ and the universe. This implies

* "To the greater gloiy of God."

Pensies 101

love of both, and more especially love of the su-
preme axis, Christ and the Church.

Communion in and through death: to die a com-
munion-death.

What comes to one at the very end: the adorable.

I go forward to meet him who comes.

27

Many people suppose that the superiority of spirit
would be jeopardized if its first manifestation were
not accompanied by some interruption of the nor-
mal advance of the world One ought rather to say
that precisely because it is spirit its appearance
must take the form of a crowning achievement, or a
blossoming. But leaving aside all thought of sys-
tematization, is it not true that every day a multi-
tude of human souls are created in the course of an
embryogenic process in which scientific observation
will never be able to detect any break however
small in the chain of biological phenomena? Thus
we have daily before our eyes an example of an act
of creation winch is absolutely imperceptible to,
and beyond the reach of, science as such. Why then
make so many difficulties when it is a question of
the first man? Obviously it is much more difficult
for us to imagine the first appearance of reflective
thought at some point in the history of a phylum or
race made up of different individuals than at some
point in the series of states making up the life of
one and the same embryo. But from the viewpoint
of creative activity considered in relationship to

102 Hymn of the Universe

phenomena, ontogenesis and phylogenesis are in
like case. Why not admit, for example, that the ab-
solutely free and special act whereby the Creator
willed humanity to be the crown of his work so
profoundly influenced and organized beforehand
the progress of the world prior to man's coming
that now this coming seems to us, in accordance
with the Creator s choice, to be the natural out-
come of all the precedent processes of life-
development? Omnia propter hominem*

28

If, on the tree of life, the mammals form a domi-
nant branch, indeed the dominant branch, then the
primates (that is, the cerebro-mammals) are its
leading shoot, and the anthropoids are the bud in
which the shoot ends.

Hence, we may go on to say, it is easy for us to
judge at what point in the biosphere we must fix
our gaze in expectation of what is yet to come. Ev-
erywhere, as we are well aware, the lines of active
phyletic development grow warm with conscious-
ness as they approach the summit; but in one
clearly-marked region at the center of the kingdom
of mammals, where the most powerful brains ever
fashioned by nature are to be found, the lines glow
red-hot; and already at the heart of this region
there burns a point of incandescence.

It is this line that we must always hold in our
gaze, this line glowing crimson with the dawn light.

* "All things are for man's sake."

PensSes 103

The flame that for thousands of years has been
rising up below the horizon is now, at a strictly lo-
calized point, about to burst forth: thought has
been born.

29

Beings endowed with self-awareness become, pre-
cisely in virtue of that bending back upon
themselves, immediately capable of rising into a
new sphere of existence: in truth another world is
born. Abstract thought, logic, reasoned choice and
invention, mathematics, art, the exact computation
of space and time, the dreams and anxieties of love:
all these activities of the inner life are simply the
bubbling up of the newly formed life-center as it
explodes upon itself ,

This being said, a question arises. If it is in fact
the attainment of "self-consciousness" that consti-
tutes true "intelligence," can we seriously doubt
that intelligence is the evolutionary prerogative of
man alone? And, if it is, can we allow some sort of
false modesty to hinder us from recognizing that
man's possession of it shows him as representing a
radical advance on all precedent forms of life? Cer-
tainly animals know; but equally certainly they
cannot know that they know: otherwise they would
long since have multiplied inventions and devel-
oped a system of internal constructions which
could not have escaped our observation. Hence a
whole domain of reality is closed to them, beyond
all possibility of access: a domain in which we for
our part can move about freely. They are separated

104 Hymn of the Universe

from us by an abyss — or a threshold — which they
can never cross. Reflective consciousness makes us
not merely different from them but wholly other: it
is a difference not merely of degree but of kind: a
change of nature, resulting from a change of state.
And so we reach precisely the conclusion we had
anticipated: since the development of life means
the rise and growth of consciousness, that develop-
ment could not continue indefinitely along its own
line without a transformation in depth: like all
great developments in the world, life had to be-
come different in order to remain itself.

30

It was a joy to me, Lord, in the midst of my strug-
gles, to feel that in growing to my own fulfillment I
was increasing your hold on me; it was a joy to me,
beneath the inward burgeoning of life and amidst
the unfolding of events that favored me, to surren-
der myself to your providence. And now that I
have discovered the joy of turning every increase
into a way of making— or allowing — your presence
to grow within me, I beg of you: bring me to a se-
rene acceptance of that final phase of communion
with you in which I shall attain to possession of
you by diminishing within you.

Now that I have learnt to see you as he who is
"more me than myself," grant that when my hour
has come I may recognize you under the appear-
ances of every alien or hostile power that seems
bent on destroying or dispossessing me. When the
erosions of age begin to leave their mark on my

PensSes 105

body, and still more on my mind; when the ills that
must diminish my life or put an end to it strike me
down from without or grow up from within me;
when I reach that painful moment at which I sud-
denly realize that I am a sick man or that I am grow-
ing old; above all at that final moment when I feel
I am losing hold on myself and becoming wholly
passive in the hands of those great unknown forces
which first formed me: at all these somber mo-
ments grant me, Lord, to understand that it is you
(provided my faith is strong enough) who are pain-
fully separating the fibers of my being so as to pen-
etrate to the very marrow of my substance and
draw me into yourself .

The more deeply and incurably my ills become
engrained in my flesh, the more it may be you
yourself that I am harboring as a loving, active
principle of purification and of liberation from pos-
sessiveness. The more the future lies ahead of me
like a dark tunnel or a dizzy abyss, the more confi-
dent I can be — if I go forward boldly, relying on
your word — of being lost, of being engulfed, in
you, Lord, of being absorbed into your Body,

Lord Christ, you who are divine energy and liv-
ing, irresistible might: since of the two of us it is
you who are infinitely the stronger, it is you who
must set me ablaze and transmute me into fire thkt
we may be welded together and made one. Grant
me, then, something even more precious than that
grace for which all your faithful followers pray: to
receive communion as I die is not sufficient: teach
me to make a communion of death itself.

106 Hymn of the Universe

31

No mechanism of evolution could gain a hold on an
entirely passive (or a fortiori resistant) cosmic ma-
terial. Hence we cannot fail to see the drama inher-
ent in the possibility that mankind might suddenly
lose all desire to achieve its destiny. Such a disen-
chantment would be conceivable, would indeed be
inevitable, if as a result of increasing reflection we
came to see that in a hermetically closed world we
were destined one day to end up in a total collec-
tive death. In the face of this terrifying fact, is it
not clear that despite the most violent pull from the
winding-chain of planetary development the psy-
chic mechanism of evolution would come to a dead
stop, its very substance stretched to breaking point
and finally disintegrating?

The more one reflects on this eventuality — and
certain morbid symptoms such as the existentialism
of Sartre prove that it is no mere fantasy — the more
one comes to the conclusion that the great enigma
presented to our minds by the phenomenon of man
is not so much how life could ever have been kin-
dled on earth as how it could ever be extinguished
on earth without finding some continuance else-
where. For once life has become reflective con-
sciousness it cannot in fact accept utter extinction
without biologically contradicting itself.

Consequently one feels less inclined to reject as
unscientific the idea that the critical point of plane-
tary reflective consciousness which is the result of
the forming of humanity into an organized society,
far from being a mere spark in the darkness, corre-

Penstes 107

sponds on the contrary to our passage (by a move-
ment of reversal or dematerialization) to another
face of the universe: not an ending of the ultrahu-
man but its arrival at something transhuman at the
very heart of reality,

32

For one who sees the universe in the guise of a la-
borious communal ascent towards the summit of
consciousness, life, far from seeming blind, hard or
despicable, becomes charged with gravity, with
responsibilities, with new relationships. Sir Oliver
Lodge very justly remarked not so long ago that,
properly understood, the doctrine of evolution is a
"school of hope" — and, let us add, a school of ever
greater mutual charity and ever greater effort

So much so that all along the line one can up-
hold, and without paradox, the following thesis
(which is doubtless the one best calculated to reas-
sure and guide men's minds when confronted with
the growth of transformist views): transformism
does not necessarily open the way to an invasion of
spirit by matter; rather does it give evidence in
favor of an essential triumph of spirit. Transform-
ism as well as, if not better than, the theory of
"fixed types" can give to the universe that grandeur
and depth and unity which are the natural atmos-
phere for Christian faith.

And this last consideration leads us to formulate
the following general conclusion:

whatever we Christians may say in the last resort
about transformism or about any other of the new

108 Hymn of the Universe

theories which attract the modern mind, let us
never give the impression of being timid about any-
thing that can bring fresh light and greater breadth
to our ideas concerning man and the universe. The
world will never be vast enough, nor humanity
powerful enough, to be worthy of him who created
them and is incarnate in them.

33

Is life an open road or a blind alley? This question,
barely formulated a few centuries ago, is today ex-
plicitly on the lips of mankind as a whole. As a re-
sult of the brief , violent moment of crisis in which
it became conscious at once of its creative power
and of its critical faculties, humanity has quite le-
gitimately become hard to move: no stimulus at the
level of mere instinct or blind economic necessity
will suffice for long to goad it into moving onwards.
Only a reason, and a valid and important reason,
for loving life passionately will cause it to advance
further. But where, at the experiential level, are we
to find, if not a complete justification, at least the
beginnings of a justification of life? Only, it would
seem, in the consideration of the intrinsic value of
the phenomenon of man. Continue to regard man
as an accidental outgrowth or sport of nature and
you will drive him into a state of disgust or revolt
which, if it became general, would mean the defini-
tive stoppage of life on earth. Recognize, on the
other hand, that within the domain of our expe-
rience man is at the head of one of the two greatest
waves into which, for us, tangible reality is divided,

PensSes 109

and that therefore he holds in his hands the for-
tunes of the universe: and immediately you cause
him to turn his face towards the grandeur of a new
sunrise.

Man has every right to be anxious about his fate
so long as he feels himself to be lost and lonely in
the midst of the mass of created things. But let him
once discover that his fate is bound up with the
fate of nature itself, and immediately, joyously, he
will begin again his forward march. For it would
denote in him not a critical sense but a malady of
the spirit if he were doubtful of the value and the
hopes of an entire world.

34

It is easy for the pessimist to belittle that extraordi-
nary period of history during which in the space of
a few thousand years civilizations crumbled one
after another into ruin. But it is surely far more
scientific to discern once again, beneath these suc-
cessive waxings and wanings, the great spiral of life
always irreversibly ascending, but by stages, along
the dominant line of its evolution. Susa, Memphis,
Athens may crumble: but an ever more highly or-
ganized awareness of the universe is passed on
from hand to hand and increases with each succes-
sive stage in clarity and brilliance.

When we are dealing in general with the gradual
development of the noosphere into planetary con-
sciousness we must of course do full justice to the
great, the essential part played by the other sec-
tions of the human race in bringing about the

110 Hymn of the Universe

eventual plenitude of the earth. But in dealing
with this historical period we should be allowing
sentiment to falsify fact if we refused to recognize
that during its centuries the principal axis of an-
thropogenesis has passed through the West It was
in this ardent zone of growth and universal recast-
ing that all that makes man what he is today was
discovered — or at least must have been rediscov-
ered, for even those things which had long been
known elsewhere achieved their definitive human
value only when they were incorporated into the
system of European ideas and activities. We are
not being merely naive if we hail as a great event
the discovery by Columbus of America.

The fact is that during the last six thousand
years, in the Mediterranean area, a neohumanity
has been germinating and is now at this moment
completing its absorption into itself of the re-
maining vestiges of the neolithic mosaic of ethnic
groupings, so as to form a new layer, of greater
density than all the others, on the noosphere.

And the proof of this is that today, in order to re-
main human or to become more fully human, all
the peoples from end to end of the earth are being
inexorably led to formulate the world's hopes and
problems in the very terms devised by the West

35

Let us admit this frankly, once and for all: what
most discredits faith in progress in the eyes of men
today, over and above its reticences and its help-
lessness in meeting the cry of the 'last days of the

Penstes 111

human species," is the unfortunate tendency still
shown by its adepts to distort into pitiful millenary
anisms all that is most valid and most noble in our
now permanently awakened expectation of the fu-
ture appearance of some form of "ultrahumanity*
An era of abundance and euphoria — a Golden Age
— is, they suggest, all that evolution could hold in
reserve for us. And it is but right that our hearts
should sink at the thought of so "bourgeois" an
ideal.

In face of this strictly "pagan" materialism and
naturalism it becomes a pressing duty to remind
ourselves once again that, if the laws of biogenesis
of their nature suppose and effectively bring about
an economic improvement in human living condi-
tions, it is not any question of well-being, it is
solely a thirst for greater being that by psychologi-
cal necessity can save the thinking world from the
taedium tdtae.

And here we can see with complete clarity the
importance of the idea, suggested above, that it is
at its point or superstructure of spiritual concentra-
tion and not at its base or infrastructure of material
arrangement that humanity must biologically es-
tablish its equilibrium.

For once we admit, following this life of argu-
ment, the existence of a critical point of species-
formation* at the end of the evolution of technical
developments and civilizations, we realize that
what finally opens out at the peak of time (main-
taining to the end the priority of tension over rest

*Fr. spSciation. (Tr. note.)

112 Hymn of the Universe

in biogenesis) is an issue: an issue not merely for
our hopes of escape but also for our awaiting of
some revelation.

And this is exactly what could best relieve that
tension between light and darkness, exaltation and
anguish, into which a renewed awareness of our
human species has plunged us.

36

Fold your wings, my soul, those wings you had
spread wide to soar to the terrestrial peaks where
the light is most ardent: it is for you simply to
await the descent of the Fire — supposing it to be
willing to take possession of you.

If you would attract its power to yourself you
must first loosen the bonds of affection which still
tie you to objects cherished too exclusively for their
own sake. The true union you ought to seek with
creatures that attract you is to be found not by
going directly to them but by converging with
them on God sought in and through them. It is not
by making themselves more material, relying solely
on physical contacts, but by making themselves
more spiritual in the embrace of God that things
draw closer to each other and, following their in-
vincible natural bent, end by becoming, all of them
together, one. Therefore, my soul, be chaste.

And when you have thus refined your crude ma-
teriality you must loosen yet further the fibers of
your substance. In your excessive self-love you are
like a molecule closed in upon itself and incapable
of entering easily into any new grouping. God looks

PensSes 113

to you to be more open and more pliant If you are
to enter into Him you need to be freer and more
eager. Have done then with your egoism and your
fear of suffering. Love others as you love yourself,
that is to say admit them into yourself, all of them,
even those whom, if you were a pagan, you would
exclude. Accept pain. Take up your cross, my
soul. • o »

37

We always tend to forget that the supernatural is &
leaven, a life-principle, not a complete organism.
Its purpose is to transform "nature"; and it cannot
do that apart from the material with which nature
presents it If the Hebrews kept their gaze fixed for
three thousand years on the coming of the Messiah
it was because they saw him effulgent with the
glory of their own people. If St Paul's disciples
lived in a constant eager yearning for the great day
of the second coming of Christ it was because they
looked to the Son of Man to give them a personal,
tangible solution to the problems and the injustices
of earthly life. The expectation of heaven cannot be
kept alive unless it is made flesh. With what body,
then, shall our own be clothed?
With an immense, completely human hope,

38

You whose loving wisdom fashions my being out of
all the forces and all the hazards of earth, teach me
to adopt here and now, however clumsily, an atti-

114 Hymn of the Universe

tude the full efficacy of which, will be plain to me
when I am face to face with the powers of dimin-
ishment and death: grant that having desired I may
believe, and believe ardently, believe above all
things, in your active presence.

Thanks to you, this faith and this expectancy are
already full of effective power. But how am I to
show you, and prove to myself, through some visi-
ble endeavor, that I am not of those who, with their
lips only, cry to you "Lord, Lord"? I shall cooperate
with that divine power through which you act upon
me and anticipate my initiatives; and I shall do so
in two ways.

First, to that profound inspiration whereby you
impel me to seek the fullness of being I shall re-
spond by striving never to stifle or distort or
squander my powers of loving and making. And
then, to your all-embracing providence which at
each moment shows me, through the events of the
day, the next step I must take, the next rung I must
climb, I shall respond by striving never to miss an
opportunity of rising up towards the realm of spirit.

39

"O ye of little faith," why fear or hold aloof from
the onward march of the world? Why foolishly
multiply your prophecies of woe and your prohibi-
tions: "Don't venture there; don't attempt that; ev-
erything is already known that can be known; the
earth is grown old and stale and empty; there is
nothing more for us to find. . . *

On the contrary, we must try everything for

PensSes 115

Christ; w£ must hope everything for Christ. Nihil
inteiifatum:* thai is the true Christian attitude.
Diviiiization means not destruction but supercrea-
tion. We can never know all that the Incarnation
still asks of the world's potentialities. We can never
hope for too much from the growing unity of man-
kind.

THE MEANING OF
HUMAN ENDEAVOR

40

The aspect of life which most stirs my soul is the
ability tp share in an undertaking, in a reality, more
enduring than myself: it is in this spirit and with
this purpose in view that I try to perfect myself
and to mastef things a little more. When death lays
its hand upon me it will leave intact these things,
these ideas, these realities which are more solid and
more precious than I; moreover, my faith in Provi-
dence makes me believe that death comes at its
own fixed moment, a moment of mysterious and
special fruitfulness not only for the supernatural
destiny of the soul but also for the further progress
of the earth. Why then should I be afraid or filled
with grief, if the essential thing in my life remains
untouched, if the pattern will not be broken off but
will be extended further without any harmful inter-
ruption of continuity? The realities of faith cannot
give us the same feeling of solidity as those of expe-

* "To leave nothing unattempted."

116 Hymn of the Universe

rience; hence, inevitably and providentially, when
we have to leave these for those we feel terrified
and bewildered: but that is the very moment at
which we must ensure the triumph of adoration
and trust and the joy of being part of a totality
greater than ourselves.

41

In the lowliness of fear and the thrill of danger we
carry on the work of completing fcn element which
the mystical body of Christ can draw only from us.
Thus to our peace is added the exaltation of creat-
ing, perilously, an eternal work which will not exist
without us. Our trust in God is quickened and
made firmer by the passionate eagerness of man to
conquer the earth.

42

It would be surprising to find, in a bouquet, flowers
which were ill-formed of sickly, since these flowers
are picked one by one and artificially grouped to-
gether in a bunch. But on a tree which has had to
struggle against inner accidents of its own develop-
ment and external accidents of climate, the broken
branches, the torn leaves, and the dried or sickly or
wilted blossoms have their place: they reveal tons
the greater or lesser difficulties encountered by the
tree itself in its growth.

Similarly in a universe where each creature
formed a little enclosed unit, designed simply for
its own sake and theoretically transposable at will,

PensSes 117

we should find some difficulty in justifying in our
own minds the presence of individuals whose po-
tentialities and upward-soaring drives had been
painfully impeded. Why this gratuitous inequality,
these gratuitous frustrations?

If on the other hand the world is in truth a bat-
tlefield whereon victory is in the making— and if
we are in truth thrown at birth into the thick of the
battle — then we can at least vaguely see how, for
the success of this universal struggle in which we
are both fighters and the issue at stake, there must
inevitably be suffering. Seen from the viewpoint of
our human experience and drawn to our human
scale, the world appears as an immense groping in
the dark, an immense searching, an immense on-
slaught, wherein there can be no advance save at
the cost of many setbacks and many wounds. Those
who suffer, whatever form their suffering may take,
are a living statement of this austere but noble con-
dition: they are simply paying for the advance and
tiie victory of all. They are the men who have
fallen on the battlefield.

43

Then it is really true, Lord? By helping on the
spread of science and freedom I can increase the
density of the divine atmosphere, in itself as well as
for me, that atmosphere in which it is always my
one desire to be immersed. By laying hold on the
earth I enable myself to cling closely to you.

May the kingdom of matter, then, under our
scrutinies and our manipulations, surrender to us

118 Hymn of the Universe

the secrets of its texture, its movements, its history.

May the world's energies, mastered by us, bow
down before us and accept the yoke of our power.

May the race of men, grown to fuller conscious-
ness and greater strength, become grouped into
rich and happy organisms in which life shall be put
to better use and bring in a hundredfold return.

May the universe offer to our gaze the symbols
and the forms of all harmony and all beauty.

I must search: and I must find.

What is at stake, Lord, is the element wherein
you will to dwell here on earth.

What is at stake is your existence amongst us.

44

Let us just consider whether we might not be able
to escape from the anxiety into which the danger-
ous power of thought is now plunging us — simply
by improving our thinking still more. And to do
this let us begin by climbing up till we tower over
the trees which now hide the forest from us; in
other words let us forget for a moment the details
of the economic crises, the political tensions, the
class struggles which block out our horizon, and let
us climb high enough to gain an inclusive and im-
partial view of the whole process of hominization*

* Hominlzation is Pere Teilhard's term for what Sir Julian
Huxley has called "progressive psychosocial evolution," i.e.,
the process whereby mankind's potentialities are more and
more fully realized in the world, and all the forces con-
tained in the animal world are progressively spiritualized in
human civilization. (Tr. note.)

Penstes 119

as it has advanced during the last fifty or sixty
years.

From this vantage point what do we first notice?
And if some observer were to come tons from one
of the stars what would he chiefly notice?

Without question, two major phenomena:

the first, that in the course of half a century tech-
nology has advanced with incredible rapidity, an
advance not just of scattered, localized technical
developments but of a real geotechnology which
spreads out the close- woven network of its interde-
pendent enterprises over the totality of the earth;

the second, that in the same period, at the same
pace and on the same scale of planetary coopera-
tion and achievement, science has transformed in
every direction — from the infinitesimal to the im-
mense and to the immensely complex — our com-
mon vision of the world and our common power of
action.

45

Lord, what is there in suffering that commits me so
deeply to you?

Why should my wings flutter more joyfully than
before when you stretch out nets to imprison me?

It is because, among your gifts, what I hanker
after is the fragrance of your power over me and
the touch of your hand upon me. For what exhila-
rates us human creatures more than freedom, more
than the glory of achievement, is the joy of finding
and surrendering to a Beauty greater than man, the
rapture of being possessed.

120 Hymn of the Universe

Blessed then be the disappointments which
snatch the cup from our lips; blessed be the chaiiis
which force us to go where we would not

Blessed be relentless time and the unending
thraldom in which it holds us: the inexorable bond-
age of time that goes too slowly and frets our impa-
tience, of time that goes too quickly and ages us, of
time that never stops, and never returns.

Blessed, above all, be death and the horror of
falling back through death into the cosmic forces.
At the moment of its coming a power as strong as
the universe pounces upon our bodies to grind
them to dust and dissolve them, and an attraction
more tremendous than any material tension draws
our unresisting souls towards their proper center.
Death causes us to lose our footing completely in
ourselves so as to deliver us over to the powers of
heaven and earth. This is its final terror — but it is
also, for the mystic, the climax of his bliss.

God's creative power does not in fact fashion us
as though out of soft clay: it is a fire that kindles
life in whatever it touches, a quickening spirit.
Therefore it is during our lifetime that we must de-
cisively adapt ourselves to it, model ourselves upon
it, identify ourselves with it. The mystic is given at
times a keen, obsessive insight into this situation.
And anyone who has this insight, and who loves,
will feel within himself a fever of active depend-
ence and of arduous purity seizing upon him and
driving him on to an absolute integrity and the
complete utilization of all his powers.

In order to become perfectly resonant to the
pulsations of the basic rhythm of reality the mystic

PensSes 121

makes himself docile to the least hint of human ob-
ligation, the most unobtrusive demands of grace.

To win for himself a little more of the creative
energy, he tirelessly develops his thought, dilates
his heart, intensifies his external activity. For cre-
ated beings must work if they would be yet further
created.

And finally, that no blemish may separate him,
by so much as a single atom of himself, from the es-
sential limpidity, he labors unceasingly to purify
Jiis affections and to remove even the very faintest
opacities which might cloud or impede the light.

46

Where human holiness offers itself as a means to
his ends, God is not content to send forth in greater
intensity his creative influence, the child of his
power: he himself comes down into his work to
consolidate its unification. He told us this, he and
no other. The more the soul's desires are concen-
trated on him, the more he will flood into them,
penetrate their depths and draw them into his own
irresistible simplicity. Between those who love one
another with true charity he appears — he is, as it
were, born — as a substantial bond of their love.

It is God himself who rises up in the heart of this
simplified world. And the organic form of the uni-
verse thus divinized is Christ Jesus, who, through
the magnetism of his love and the effective power
of his Eucharist, gradually gathers into himself all
the unitive energy scattered through his creation.

Christ consumes with his glance my entire being.

122 Hymn of the Universe

And with that same glance, that same presence, he
enters into those who are around me and whom
I love. Thanks to him therefore I am united with
them, as in a divine milieu, through their inmost
selves, and I can act upon them with all the re-
sources of my being.

Christ binds us and reveals us to one another.

What my lips fail to convey to my brother or my
sister he will tell them better than I. What my heart
desires for them with anxious, helpless ardor he
will grant them if it be good. What men cannot
hear because of the feebleness of my voice, what
they shut their ears against so as not to hear it, this
I can confide to Christ who will one day tell it
again, to their hearts. And if all this is so I can in-
deed die with my ideal, I can be buried with the vi-
sion I wanted to share with others. Christ gathers
up for the life of tomorrow our stifled ambitions,
our inadequate understandings, our uncompleted
or clumsy but sincere endeavors. Nunc dimittis,
Domine, servum tuum in pace. . . .*

It happens sometimes that a man who is pure of
heart will discern in himself, besides the happiness
which brings peace to his own individual desires
and affections, a quite special joy, springing from a
source outside himself, which enfolds him in an im-
measurable sense of weUrbeing. This is the flowing
back into his own diminutive personality of the
new glow of health which Christ through his incar-
nation has infused into humanity as a whole: in

*"Now thou dost dismiss thy servant, O Lord, in peace."
(Luke 2.29.)

PensSes 123

him, souls are gladdened with a feeling of warmth,
for now they can live in communion with one an-
other. . . ,

But if they are to share in this joy and this vision
they must first of all have had the courage to break
through the narrow confines of their individuality,
cease to be egocentric and become Christocentric.

For this is Christ's law, and it is categorical: Si
quis vult post me venire, abneget semetipsum*

Purity is a basic condition of this self-re-
nouncement and mortification.

And charity much more so.

Once a man has resolved to live generously in
love with God and his fellow-men, he realizes that
so far he has achieved nothing by the generous re-
nunciations he has made in order to perfect his own
inner unity. This unity in its turn must, if it is to be
born anew in Christ, suffer an eclipse which will
seem to annihilate it. For in truth those will be
saved who dare to set the center of their being out-
side themselves, who dare to love Another more
than themselves, and in some sense become this
Other: which is to say, who dare to pass through
death to find life. Si quis vult animam suam salvam
facere, perdet earn. * ?

Clearly, the believer knows that at the price of
this sacrifice he is gaining a unity greatly superior
to that which he has abandoned. But who can tell

* "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself."
(Matt. 16.24.)

** "For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; for he that
shall lose his life for my sake, shall save it." (Luke 9.24.)

124 Hymn of the Universe

the anguish of this metamorphosis? Between the
moment when he consents to dissolve his inferior
unity and that other, rapturous moment when he
arrives at the threshold of his new existence, the
real Christian feels himself to be hovering over an
abyss of disintegration and annihilation. The salva-
tion of the soul must be bought at the price of a
great risk incurred and accepted: we Jiave, without
reservation, to stake earth against heaven; we have
to give up the secure and tangible unity of the ego-
centric life and risk everything on God. "If the
grain of wheat does not fall into the ground and
die, it remains just a grain/'

Therefore when a man is burdened with sorrow,
when he falls ill, when he dies, none of those
around him can say with certainty whether his
being is thereby diminished or increased. For
under exactly the same appearances the two oppo-
site principles draw to themselves their faithful,
leading them either to simplicity or to multiplicity:
the two principles which are God and Nothing-

47

Egoism, whether personal or racial, has good rea-
son to be thrilled at the idea of an individual ele-
ment ascending, through its fidelity to life, to the
uttermost development of all that is unique and in-

* <<r rhe self-conscious death-throes of an eternal decom-
position" writes the author elsewhere, of this antipode of
God, (Ed. note.)

PensSes 125

communicable within itself. Its instinct therefore is
correct Its only mistake, but one which causes it to
aim in exactly the wrong direction, is to confuse in-
dividuality with personality. By trying to separate
itself as far as possible from others, the element in-
dividualizes itself; but in so doing it falls back, and
tries to drag the world back into plurality and ma-
teriality. In point of fact therefore it dwindles away
and is lost. If we are to be fully ourselves we must
advance in the opposite direction, towards a con-
vergence with all other beings, towards a union
with what is other than ourselves. The perfection of
our own being, the full achievement of what is
unique in each one of us, lies not in our individual-
ity but in our personality; and because of the evo-
lutionary structure of the world we can find that
personality only in union with others. There can be
no mind without synthesis; and this same law holds
good everywhere in created reality, from top to
bottom. The true self grows in inverse proportion
to the growth of egoism. The element becomes per-
sonal only in so far as (in imitation of that Omega
point which draws it onwards) it becomes univer-
sal

But there is an obvious and essential proviso to
be made. It follows from the foregoing analysis that
if the human particles are to become truly person-
alized under the creative influence of union it is not
enough for them to be joined together no matter
how. Since what is in question is the achieving of a
synthesis of centers it must be center to center and
in no other way that they establish contact with
one another. Amongst the various forms of psychic

126 Hymn of the Universe

interaction which animate the noosphere, therefore,
it is the "intercentric" energies that we have above
all to identify, to harness and to develop if we
would make an effective contribution to the prog-
ress of evolution within ourselves.

In other words, the problem to which all this
leads us is the problem of love.

48

The sacramental bread is made out of grains of
wheat which have been pressed out and ground in
the mill; and the dough has been slowly kneaded.
Your hands, Lord Jesus, have broken the bread be-
fore they hallow it. • . .

Who shall describe, Lord, the violence suffered,
by the universe from the monent it falls under your
sway?

Christ is the goad that urges creatures along the
road of effort, of elevation, of development.

He is the sword that mercilessly cuts away such
of the body's members as are unworthy or decayed.

He is that mightier life which inexorably brings
death to our base egoism so as to draw into itself
all our capacities for loving.

That Christ may enter deeply into us we need al-
ternatively the work that dilates the heart and the
sorrow that brings death to it, the life that enlarges
a man in order that he may be sanctifiable and the
death that diminishes him in order that he may be
sanctified.

The universe splits in two, it suffers a painful
cleavage at the heart of each of its monads, as the

PensSes 127

flesh of Christ is born and grows. like the work of
creation which it redeems Mid surpasses, the Incar-
nation, so desired of man, is an awe-inspiring work:
it is achieved through blood.

May the blood of the Lord Jesus — the blood
which is infused into creatures and the blood which
is shed and spread out over all, the blood of en-
deavor and the blood of renouncement-— mingle
with the pain of the world.

Hie est calix sanguinis rnei* . . .*

49

To be pure of heart means to love God above all
things and at the same time to see him everywhere
in all things. The just man, whether he is rising
above and beyond all creatures to an almost imme-
diate awareness of Godhead or throwing himself
upon the world — as it is every man's duty to do — to
conquer it and bring it to perfection, will have eyes
only for God. For him, objects have lost their sur-
face multiplicity: in each of them, according to the
measure of its own particular qualities and possibil-
ities, God may truly be laid hold on. The pure
heart is of its nature privileged to move within an
immense and superior unity. Who then could fail to
see that the effect of this contact with God must be
to unify it to the inmost core of its being; and who
could fail to divine the inestimable aid that life in
its progress will henceforth derive from the Word?
While the sinner, by abandoning himself to his

• This is the chalice of my blood. . . 7*

128 Hymn of the Universe

appetites, brings about a dispersal and disintegra-
tion of his spirit, the saint, by an inverse process,
escapes from the complexities of affection and in so
doing he immaterializes himself. For him, Cod is
everything and everything is God, and Christ is at
once God and everything. On such an object,
which comprises in its simplicity — for the eyes, the
heart, the spirit— all the truth and all the beauties
of heaven and earth, the soul's faculties converge,
touch, are welded together in the flame of a single
act which is indistinguishably both vision and love.
Thus the activity proper to purity (in scholastic
terms, its formal effect) is the unification of the
inner powers of the soul in a single act of appeti-
tion of extraordinary richness and intensity. In fine,
the pure heart is the heart which, surmounting the
multiple and disruptive pull of created things,
fortifies its unity (which is to say, matures its spirit-
uality) in the fire of the divine simplicity.

What purity effects in the individual, charity
brings about toithin the community of souls. One
cannot but be surprised (when one looks at it with
a mind not dulled by habit) at the extraordinary
care taken by Christ to urge upon men the impor-
tance of loving one another. Mutual love is the
Masters new commandment, the distinguishing
mark of his disciples, the sure sign of predestina-
tion, the principal work to be achieved in all
human existence. In the end we shall be judged
on love, by love we shall be condemned or justi-
fied. • e o

Pensies 129

50

We make bold to boast of our age as an age of sci-
ence. And to a certain extent welre justified, if we
are thinking simply in terms of* the dawn as op-
posed to the night which preceded it Thanks to
our discoveries and our methods of research, some-
thing of enormous import has been born in the uni-
verse, something which I am convinced will now
never be stopped. But while we exalt research and
profit by it, with what pettiness of mind, what pal-
try means, what disorderly methods, do we still
today pursue our researches!

Have we ever given serious thought to out sorry
predicament?

Like art, and one might almost say like thought
itself, science seemed at its birth to be but superflu-
ity and fantasy, the product of an exuberant
overflow of inward activity beyond the sphere of
the material necessities of life, the fruit of the curi-
osity of dreamers and idlers. Then, little by little, it
achieved an importance and an effectiveness which
earned for it the freedom of the city. We who live
in a world which it can truly be said to have revo-
lutionized acknowledge its social significance and
sometimes even make it the object of a cult Never-
theless we still leave it to grow as best it can,
hardly tending it at all, like those wild plants
whose fruits are plucked by primitive peoples in
their forests.

130 Hymn of the Universe

51

Given a really deep, insight into the concept of col-
lectivity, we are t>ound, I think, to understand the
term without any Attenuation of meaning, and cer-
tainly as no mere metaphor, when we apply it to
the sum of all human beings. The immensity of the
universe is necessarily homogeneous both in its na-
ture and in its dimensions. Would it still be so if
the loops of its spiral were to lose any slightest de-
gree of reality or consistence as they mount higher
and higher? The as yet unnamed reality which the
gradual combination of individuals, of peoples, of
races, will eventually bring into existence in the
world must, if it is to be coherent with the rest of
reality, be not infraphysical hut supraphysical.
Deeper than the common act of vision in which it
expresses itself, and more important than the
common power of action from which it emerges by
a sort of autogenesis, there is the reality itself to
which we must look forward, the reality constituted
by the vital union of all the particles endowed with
reflective consciousness.

To say this is simply to say (what is indeed prob-
able enough) that the stuff of the universe does not
achieve its full evolutionary cycle when it achieves
consciousness, and that we are therefore moving on
towards some new critical point. In spite of its or-
ganic connecting-links, the existence of which is ev-
erywhere apparent to us, the biosphere still formed
no more than an assemblage of divergent lines, free
at their extremities. Then, thanks to reflective

PensSes 131

thought and the recoils it involves, the lines con-
verge and the loose ends meet: the noosphere be-
comes a single closed system in ^yhich each element
individually sees, feels, desires' and suffers the same
things as all the rest together wSh them.

Thus we have a harmonized collectivity of con-
sciousnesses which together make up a sort of su-
perconsciousness; the earth not merely covered by
myriads of grains of thought but enclosed in one
single enveloping consciousness so that it forms,
functionally, a single vast grain of thought on a si-
dereal scale of immensity, the plurality of individ-
ual acts of reflective consciousness coming together
and reinforcing one another in a single unani-
mous act.

Such is the general form in which, by analogy
and in symmetry with the past, we are led scientifi-
cally to envisage that humanity of the future in
which alone the terrestrial drives implicit in our ac-
tivity can find a terrestrial fulfillment.

52

You know, my God, that I can now scarcely discern
in the world the lineaments of its multiplicity; for
when I gaze at it I see it chiefly as a limitless reser-
voir in which the two contrary energies of joy and
suffering are accumulating in vast quantities — and
for the most part lying unused.

And I see how through this restless, wavering
mass there pass powerful psychic currents made up
of souls who are carried away by a passion for art,

132 Hymn of the Universe

for love, for science and the mastery of the uni-
verse, for the autonomy of the individual, for the
freedom of mankind..

From time to tii^e. these currents collide one with
another in formidable crises which cause them to
seethe and foam in their efforts to establish their
equilibrium.

What glory it were for you, my God, and what
an affluence of life to your humanity, could all this
spiritual power be harmonized in youl

Lord, to see drawn from so much wealth, lying
unused or put to base uses, all the dynamism that is
locked up within it: this is my dream. And to share
in bringing this about: this is the work to which I
would dedicate myself .

As far as I can, because 1 am a priest, I would
henceforth be the first to become aware of what the
world loves, pursues, suffers. I would be the first to
seek, to sympathize, to toil; the first in self-
fulfillment, the first in self-denial. For the sake of
the world I would be more widely human in my
sympathies and more nobly terrestrial in my ambi-
tions than any of the world's servants.

On the one hand I want to plunge into the midst
of created things and, mingling with them, seize
hold upon and disengage from them all that they
contain of life eternal, down to the very last frag-
ment, so that nothing may be lost; and on the other
hand I want, by practicing the counsels of perfec-
tion, to salvage through their self-denials all the
heavenly fire imprisoned within the three-fold con-
cupiscence of the flesh, of avarice, of pride: in
other words to hallow, through chastity, poverty

PensSes 133

and obedience, the power enclosed in love, in gold,
in independence.

That is why I have clothed 1 my vows and my
priesthood (and it is this that gives me my strength
and my happiness) in a detefinination to accept
and to divinize the powers of the earth.

53

Show all your faithful followers, Lord, in how real
and complete a sense opera sequuntur illos, their
works follow after them into your kingdom. Other-
wise they will be like indolent workmen who find
no spin: to action in a task to be achieved; or else, if
a healthy human instinct overrides their hesitancies
or the fallacies they derive from a misunder-
standing of religion, they will still be a prey to a
fundamental division and frustration within them-
selves, and it will be said that the sons of heaven
cannot, on the human level, compete with true con-
viction and therefore on equal terms with the chil-
dren of this world,

54

In the Christian vision, the great triumph of the
Creator and Redeemer is to have transformed into
an essential agent of life bestowal what in itself is a
universal power of diminishment and extinction. If
God is definitively to enter into us, he must in some
way hollow us out, empty us, so as to make room
for himself. And if we are to be assimilated into
him, he must first break down the molecules of our

134 Hymn of the Universe

being so as to recast and remold us. It is the func-
tion of death to make the necessary opening into
our inmost selves. Death brings about in us the re-
quired dissociation; death puts us into that state
which is organically necessary if the divine fire is to
descend upon us. And thus its baneful power to
bring about decomposition and dissolution is har-
nessed to the most sublime of life's activities. What
was of its nature void, empty, a regression into plu-
rality, can now in every human being become plen-
itude and unity in God.

55

The (Hvinizing of our efforts through the value of
the intention we put into them infuses into all our
actions a soul of great price, but it does not confer
on their bodies the hope of resurrection. Yet that
hope is a necessity if our joy is to be complete.
True, it is no small thing to be able to reflect that, if
we love God, something of our inner activity, our
operatio, will never perish. But what of the results
of that activity, the products of our minds and
hearts and hands, our achievements, our opus: shall
not these too be in some way preserved, "eternal-
ized"?

Indeed, Lord, yes, it will be so, in virtue of a
claim which you yourself have implanted in the
depths of my will. I want it to be so, I need that it
should be so.

I want it because I cannot help loving all that
your constant help enables me each day to bring
into being. A thought, a harmony, the achievement

PensSes 135

of a perfection in materiaL things, some special
nuance in human love, the exquisite complexity of
a smile or a glance, every new embodiment of
beauty appearing in me or around me on the
human face of the earth: I cherish them all like
children whose flesh I cannot believe destined to
complete extinction. If I believed that these things
were to perish for ever, would I have given them
life? The deeper I look into myself the more clearly
I become aware of this psychological truth: that no
mm would lift his little finger to attempt the small-
est task unless he were spurred on by a more or less
obscure conviction that in some infinitesimally tiny
way he is contributing, at least indirectly, to the
building up of something permanent — in other
words, to your own work, Lord.

56

But, once again, we must tell ourselves: "In truth I
say to you: only the daring can enter the kingdom
of God, hidden henceforth in the heart of the
world"

It is of no use to read these pages, or other simi-
lar pages written twenty centuries ago, merely with
one's eyes. Anyone who, without having put his
hand to the plough, thinks he has mastered them is
deluding himself. We must try to live them.

If we would form an idea of the active power of
faith and of what it achieves we must have strug-
gled long and patiently: we must, in view of the
practical uncertainty of the morrow, have thrown
ourselves, in a true act of inward submission, upon

136 Hymn of the Universe

Providence considered as being as physically real
as the objects of our disquietude; we must, in our
suffering of the ills we have incurred, our remorse
for sins we have committed, our vexation over the
opportunities we have missed, have forced our-
selves to believe unhesitatingly that God is power-
ful enough to turn each and every particular evil
into good; we must, despite appearances to the
contrary, have acted without reservation as though
chastity, humility, gentleness were the only direc-
tions in which our being could make progress; we
must, in the penumbra of death, have forced our-
selves not to look back to the past but to seek in
utter darkness the love of God.

Only he who has fought bravely and been victo-
rious in the struggle against the spurious security
and strength and attraction of the past can attain to
the firm and blissful experiential certainty that the
more we lose all foothold in the darkness and insta-
bility of the future, the more deeply we penetrate
into God.

57

No, Lord, you do not ask of me anything that is
false or beyond my power to achieve. Through
your self-revealing and the power of your grace
you simply compel what is most human in us to
become at long last aware of itself. Humanity has
been sleeping — and still sleeps — lulled within the
narrowly confining joys of its little closed loves. In
the depths of the human multitude there slumbers
an immense spiritual power which will manifest it-

PensSes 137

self only when we have learned how to 'break
through the dividing walls of our egoism and raise
ourselves up to an entirely new perspective* so that
habitually and in a practical fashion we fix our gaze
on the universal realities.

Lord Jesus, you who are the Savior of our human
activity because you bring us a motive for acting,
and the Savior of our human pain because you
endow it with a life-giving value: be also the Savior
of our human unity by compelling us to repudiate
all our pettiness and, relying on you, to venture
forth on to the uncharted ocean of charity.

IN THE TOTAL CHBIST

58

/Since Jesus was born, and grew to his full stature,
and died, everything has continued to move for-
ward because Christ is not yet fully formed: he has
not yet gathered about him the last folds of his
robe of flesh and of love which is made up of his
faithful followers. The mystical Christ has not yet
attained to his full growth; and therefore the same
is true of the cosmic Christ. Both of these are si-
multaneously in the state of being and of becom-
ing; and it is from the prolongation of this process
of becoming that all created activity ultimately
springs. Christ is the end point of the evolution,
even the natural evolution, of all beings; and there-
fore evolution is holy?^

138 Hymn of the Universe

59

In manus tuas commendo spiritum tneum* Into
the hands which broke and quickened the bread,
which blessed and caressed little children, which
were pierced with the nails; into the hands which
are like our hands, the hands of which one can
never tell what they will do with the object they
are holding, whether they will break it or heal it,
but which we know will always obey and reveal
impulses filled with kindness and will always clasp
us ever more closely, ever more jealously; into the
gentle and mighty hands which can reach down
into the very depth of tibe soul, the hands which
fashion, which create, the hands through which
flows out so great a love: into these hands it is com-
forting to surrender oneself, especially if one is
suffering or afraid. And there is both great happi-
ness and great merit in so doing.

60

It is the whole of my being, Lord Jesus, that you
would have me give you, tree and fruit alike, the
finished work as well as the harnessed power, the
opus together with the operation. To allay your
hunger and slake your thirst, to nourish your body
and bring it to its full stature, you need to find in
us a substance which will truly be food for you.
And this food ready to be transformed into you,
this nourishment for your flesh, I will prepare for

* "Into thy hands I commend my spirit." (Luke 23.46.)

TensSes 139

you by liberating the spirit in myself and in every-
thing:

through an effort (even a purely natural effort)
to learn the truth, to live the good, to create the
beautiful;

through cutting away all inferior and evil ener-
gies;

through practicing that charity towards all men
which alone can gather up the multitude into a
single soul. ...

To promote, in however small a degree, the
awakening of spirit in the world is to offer to the in-
carnate Word an increase of reality and stability; it
is to allow his influence to grow in intensity around
us.

61

Through everything in me that has subsistence and
resonance, everything that enlarges me from-
within, everything that arouses me, attracts me,
wounds me from without: through all these, Lord,
you work upon me, you mold and spiritualize my
formless clay, you transform me into yourself.

In order to take possession of me, my God, you
who are so much more remote in your immensity
and so much deeper in the intimacy of your ind-
welling than all things else, you take to yourself
and unite together the immensity of the world and
the intimate depths of my being: and I am con-
scious of bearing deep within me all the strain and
struggle of the universe.

But, Lord, I do not just passively give way to

140 Hymn of the Universe

these blessed passivities: I offer myself to them, ac-
tively, and do all I can to promote them.

I know how the life-giving power of the host can
be blocked by our freedom of will. If I seal up the
entry into my heart I must dwell in darkness — and
not only I, my individual soul, but the whole uni-
verse in so far as its activity sustains my organism
and awakens my consciousness, and in so far also as
I act upon it in my turn so as to draw forth from it
the materials of sensation, of ideas, of moral good-
ness, of holiness of life. But if on the other hand my
heart is open to you, then at once through the pure
intent of my will the divine must flood into the uni-
verse in so far as the universe is centered on me.
Since, by virtue of my consent, I shall have become
a living particle of the body of Christ, all that
affects me must in the end help on the growth of
the total Christ. Christ will flood into me and over
me, me and my cosmos.

How I long, Lord Christ, for this to bel

May my acceptance be ever more complete,
more comprehensive, more intense!

May my being, in its self-offering to you, become
ever more open and more transparent to your
influence!

And may I thus feel your activity coming ever
closer, your presence growing ever more intense,
everywhere around me.

Fiat, fiat.

PensSes 141

62

If we look at the world simultaneously from an
evolutionary and a spiritual point of view we shall
see it as being a tremendous responsibility but also,
even at the lowliest stages of belief in God, we
shall see it as glowing with an irresistible attrac-
tion. For then it is not just a few privileged crea-
tures that are seen as capable of satisfying each
man's essential need of finding something to love
him and complement him: it is, thanks to these few
and as a sort of reflection of them, the sum total of
all the beings engaged together with him in the uni-
fying work of the cosmos. In the last resort each
element can find its beatitude only in union with
the totality and with the transcendent Center re-
quired to set the totality in motion. Consequently,
if it is not possible for him, psychologically to sur-
round each being with that particular, overflowing
affection which characterizes our human love, at
least he can nurture in his heart that generalized
but none the less real affection for all that is which
will cause him to cherish in each thing, over and
above its surface qualities, the being itself — that is
to say, that indefinable, elect part of each thing
which, under God's influence, gradually becomes
flesh of his flesh.

Such a love has no exact equivalent among the
various kinds of attachment to be found in our or-
dinary human relationships. Its "material object"
(as the Schoolmen would say)* is so immense and

* The material object of (for instance) a science is the sub-
ject matter, in general, with which it is concerned; its for-

■ -/-. - . "

142 Hymn of the Universe

its "formal object" so profound that it can be ex-
pressed only in terms at once of marriage and of
adoration. In it, all distinction between egoism and
disinterestedness tends to evaporate. Each one
loves himself and seeks his own fulfillment in the
fulfillment of all the rest; and the least gesture of
possession turns into an effort to attain, in the far-
distant future, to what shall be the same in all.

63

Henceforth we know enough — and it is already a
great deal— to be able to say that these onward
gropings of life will succeed only in one condition:
that the whole endeavor shall have unity as its key-
note. Of its very nature the advance of the biologi-
cal process demands this. Outside this atmosphere
of a union glimpsed and longed for, the most legiti-
mate demands are bound to lead to catastrophe:
we can see this only too clearly at the present mo-
ment. On the other hand, once this atmosphere is
created almost any solution will seem as good as all
the others, and every sort of effort will succeed, at
least in the beginning. Thus, if in dealing with the
problem of the various human races, their appear-
ance, their awakening, their future, we start from
its purely biological roots, it will lead us to recog-
nize that the only climate in which man can con-

mal object is the specific aspect under which that subject
matter is studied. Thus man is the material object alike of
anthropology, psychology, physiology and so on, the formal
object being different in each case.

PensSes 143

tinue to grow is that of devotion and self-denial in
a spirit of brotherhood. In truth, at the rate the
consciousness and the ambitions of the world are
increasing, it will explode unless it learns to love.
The future of the thinking earth is organically
bound up with the turning of the forces of hate into
forces of charity,

64

Though the phenomena of the lower world remain
the same — the material determinisms, the vicissi-
tudes of chance, the laws of labor, the agitations of
men, the footfalls of death — he who dares to be-
lieve reaches a sphere of created reality in which
things, while retaining their habitual texture, seem
to be made out of a different substance. Everything
remains the same so far as phenomena are con-
cerned, but at the same time everything becomes
luminous, animated, loving. . . .

Through the workings of faith, Christ appears,
Christ is born, without any violation of nature's
laws, in the heart of the world.

65

As the years go by, Lord, I come to see more and
more clearly, in myself and in those around me,
that the great secret preoccupation of modern man
is much less to battle for possession of the world
than to find a means of escaping from it. The an-
guish of feeling that one is not merely spatially but
ontologically imprisoned in the cosmic bubble; the

144 Hymn of the Universe

anxious search for an issue to, or more exactly a
focal point for, the evolutionary process: these are
the prices we must pay for the growth of planetary
consciousness; these are the dimly-recognized bur- v
dens which weigh down the souls of Christian and
gentile alike in the world of today.

Now that humanity has become conscious of the
movement which carries it onwards it has more and
more need of finding, above and beyond itself, an
infinite objective, an infinite issue, to which it can
wholly dedicate itself.

And what is this infinity? The effect of twenty
centuries of mystical travail has been precisely to
show us that the Baby of Bethlehem, the Man on
the Cross, is also the Principle of all movement and
the unifying Center of the world: how then can we
fail to identify this God not merely of the old cos-
mos but also of the new cosmogenesis, this God so
greatly sought after by our generation, with you,
Lord Jesus, you who make him visible to our eyes
and bring him close to us?

66

Let us leave the surface and, without leaving the
world, plunge into God. There, and from there, in
him and through him we shall hold all things and
have command of all things, we shall find again the
essence and the splendor of all the flowers, the
lights, we have had to surrender here and now in
order to be faithful to life. Those beings whom here
and now we despair of ever reaching and influenc-
ing, they too will be there, united together at that

Pens6e$ 145

central point in their being which is at once the
most vulnerable, the most receptive and the most
enriching. There, even the least of our desires and
our endeavors will be gathered and preserved, and
be able to evoke instantaneous vibration from the
very heart of the universe.

Let us then establish ourselves in the divine
milieu. There, we shall be within the inmost depths
of souls and the greatest consistency of matter.
There, at the confluence of all the forms of beauty,
we shall discover the ultravital, ultraperceptible,
ultraactive point of the universe; and, at the same
time, we shall experience in the depths of our own
being the effortless deployment of the plenitude of
all our powers of action and of adoration.

For it is not merely that at that privileged point
all the external springs of the world are coordi-
nated and harmonized: there is the further, com-
plementary marvel that the man who surrenders
himself to the divine milieu feels his own inward
powers directed and enlarged by it with a sureness
which enables him effortlessly to avoid the all too
numerous reefs on which mystical quests have so
often foundered.

67

Lord, once again I ask: which is the more precious
of these two beatitudes, that all things are means
through which I can touch you, or that you your-
self are so "universal" that I can experience you and
lay hold on you in every creature?
Some think to make you more lovable in my eyes

146 Hymn of the Universe

by praising almost exclusively the charm and the
kindness of your human face as men saw it long
ago on earth. But if I sought only a human being to
cherish, would I not turn to those whom you have
given me here and now in all the charm of their
flowering? Do we not all have around us irresistibly
lovable mothers, brothers, sisters, friends? Why
should we go searching the Judaea of two thousand
years ago? No, what I cry out for, like every other
creature, with my whole being, and even with all
my passionate earthly longings, is something very
different from an equal to cherish: It is a God to
adore.

68

Lord Jesus, Master before whose beauty and all-
demanding love we have cause to tremble: turning
my eyes away from what my human weakness can-
not as yet understand and therefore cannot bear to
think about — the idea that there are in reality souls
eternally damned* — I would at least make the con-
stant somber menace of damnation a part of my ha-
bitual and practical vision of the world, not so
much in order to fear you, but rather in order to
become more passionately surrendered to you.

* According to Catholic teaching, the existence of hell,. of a
state of eternal damnation, is an article of faith (as indeed,
given free will and evil, it is a logical necessity); but that
some human beings are or will be in fact damned is not an
article of faith (though again logically it must be regarded
as a possibility): hence Pere Teilhard's prayer further on in
this passage, (Tr. note.)

Pensies 147

A moment ago I cried out to you: be to me, Lord
Jesus, not only a brother, but a God. And now, pan-
oplied as you are in that fearsome power of choos-
ing and rejecting which places you at the world's
summit as principle of universal attraction and
universal repulsion, now you do truly appear to me
as that vast and vital force which I sought every-
where that I might adore it And now I realize that
the fires of hell and the fires of heaven are not two
different forces but are contrary manifestations of
one and the same energy.

Let not the hell-flames touch me, Master, nor any
of those I love, nor indeed anyone at all (and I
know, my Lord and God, that you will forgive me
the audacity of my prayer), but may their somber
glow, and all the abysses they reveal, be for each
and all of us incorporated into the blazing pleni-
tude of your divine milieu.

69

lift up your head, Jerusalem, and see the immense
multitude of those who build and those who seek;
see all those who toil in laboratories, in studios, in
factories, in the deserts and in the vast crucible of
human society. For all the ferment produced by
their labors, in art, in science, in thought, all is for
you.

Therefore open wide your arms, open wide your
heart, and like Christ your Lord welcome the
wave-flow, the flood, of the sap of humanity. Take
it to yourself, for without its baptism you will
wither away for lack of longing as a flower withers

148 Hymn of the Universe

for lack of water; and preserve it and care for it,
since without your sun it will go stupidly to waste
in sterile shoots.

What has become of the temptations aroused by
a world too vast in its horizons, too seductive in its
beauty?

They no longer exist.

The earth mother can indeed take me now into
the immensity of her arms. She can enlarge me
with her life, or take me back into her primordial
dust She can adorn herself for me with every al-
lurement, every horror, every mystery. She can in-
toxicate me with the scent of her tangibility and
her unity. She can throw me to my knees in expec-
tancy of what is maturing in her womb.

But all her enchantments can no longer harm me,
since she has become for me, more than herself and
beyond herself, the body of him who is and who is
to come.

70

To read the gospel with an open mind is to see
beyond all possibility of doubt that Jesus came to
bring us new truths concerning our destiny: not
only a new life superior to that we are conscious of,
but also in a very real sense a new physical power
of acting upon our temporal world.

Through a failure to grasp the exact nature of
this power newly bestowed on all who put their
confidence in God — a failure due either to a hesita-
tion in face of what seems to us so unlikely or to a
fear of falling into illuminism — many Christians

Pensies 149

neglect this earthly aspect of the promises of the
Master, or at least do hot give themselves to it with
that complete hardihood which he nevertheless
never tires of asking of us, if only we have ears to
hear him.

We must not allow timidity or modesty to turn us
into poor craftsmen. If it is true that the develop-
ment of the world can be influenced by our faith in
Christ, then to let this power He dormant within us
would indeed be unpardonable,

71

God, who cannot in any way blend or be mingled
with the creation which he sustains and animates
and binds together, is nonetheless present in the
birth, the growth and the consummation of all
things.

The earthly undertaking which is beyond all par-
allel is the physical incorporation of the faithful
into Christ and therefore into God. And this su-
preme work is carried out with the exactitude and
the harmony of a natural process of evolution.

At the inception of the undertaking there had to
be a transcendent act which, in accordance with
mysterious but physically regulated conditions,
should graft the person of a God into the human
cosmos. This was the Incarnation: Et Verbum caro
factum est.* And from this first, basic contact of
God with our human race, and precisely by virtue
of this penetration of the divine into our human na-

* "And the Word was made Flesh." (John 1.14.)

150 Hymn of the Universe

ture, a new life was born: that unforeseeable ag-
grandizement and "obediential"* extension of our
natural capacities which we call "grace." Now
grace is the sap which, rising in the one trunk,
spreads through all the veins in obedience to the
pulsations of the one heart; it is the nerve-impulse
flowing through all the members at the command
of the one brain; and the radiant Head, the mighty
Heart, the fruitful Tree are, of necessity, Christ.
(^The Incarnation means the renewal, the restora-
tion, of all the energies and powers of the universe;
Christ is the instrument, the Center and the End of
all creation, animate and material; through him ev-
erything is created, hallowed, quickened. This is
the constant, general teaching of St John and St
Paul (that most "cosmic" of sacred writers), a
teaching which has passed into the most solemn
phrases of the liturgy, but which we repeat and
which f uture generations will go on repeating to
the end without ever being able to master or to
measure its profound and mysterious meaning,
bound up as it is with the comprehension of the
universeTl

72

Only love can bring individual beings to their per-
fect completion, as individuals, by uniting them

* An obediential potentiality is one whose actualization
goes beyond the natural, innate limitations of its subject,
while not being irreconcilable with those limitations, e.g. the
direct intuition of God in the beatific vision. (Tr. note.)

Tens6e$ 151

one with another, because only loves takes posses-
sion of them and unites them by what lies deepest
within them. This is simply a fact of our everyday
experience. For indeed at what moment do lovers
come into the most complete possession of them-
selves if not when they say they are lost in one
another? And is not love all the time achieving—
in couples, in teams, all around us — the magical
and reputedly contradictory feat of personalizing
through totalizing? And why should not what is
thus daily achieved on a small scale be repeated
one day on worldwide dimensions?

Humanity, the spirit of the earth, the synthesis of
individuals and peoples, the paradoxical concilia-
tion of the element with the whole, of the one with
the many: all these are regarded as Utopian fan-
tasies, yet they are biologically necessary; and if we
would see them made flesh in the world what more
need we do than imagine our power to love grow-
ing and broadening till it can embrace the totality
of men of the earth?

73

You, Lord Jesus, are the epitome and the crown of
all perfection, human and cosmic. No flash of
beauty, no enchantment of goodness, no element of
force, but finds in you the ultimate refinement and
consummation of itself. To possess you is in truth to
hold gathered into a single object the perfect as-
semblage of all that the universe can give us and
make us dream of. The unique savor of the glory
and wonder of your being has so effectively drawn

152 Hymn of the Universe

out from the earth and synthetized all the most ex-
quisite savors that the earth contains or can suggest
that now we can find them, endlessly, one after an-
other according to our desires, in you — you the
Bread that "holds within it every delight."

You who are yourself the plenitudo entis creati,
the fullness of created being, Lord Jesus, are also
the plenitudo entis met, the fullness of my own per-
sonal being, and of all living creatures who accept
your dominion. In you and in you alone, as in a
boundless abyss, our powers can launch forth into
activity and find surcease for their tensions, can
show their full capacity without encountering any
limitation, can plunge into love and into the wild
abandon of love with the certainty of finding in
your depths no wreck-rocks of failure, no shallows
of pettiness, no currents of perverted truth.

By you and by you alone, who are the entire and
proper object of our love and the creative energy
that fathoms the secrets of our hearts and the mys-
tery of our growth, our souls are awakened, sensi-
tized, enlarged, to the utmost limit of their latent
potentialities.

And under your influence and yours alone, the
sheath of organic isolation and of willful egoism
which separates the monads from one another is
cleft asunder and dissolves, and the multitude of
souls rush on towards that union which is necessary
for the maturity of the world.

Thus a third plenitude is added to the other two.
In a very real sense, Lord Jesus, you are the ple-
nitudo entium, the full assemblage of all the beings
who shelter, and meet and are forever united,

PensSes 153

within the mystical bonds of your body. In your
breast, my God, better than in any embrace, I pos-
sess all those whom I love and who are illumined
by, your beauty and in their turn illumine you with
the rays of light (so powerful in their effect on our
hearts) which they receive from you and send back
to you. That multitude of beings, so daunting in its
magnitude, that I so long to help, to enlighten, to
lead to you: it is already there, Lord, gathered to-
gether within you. Through you I can reach into
the inmost depths of every being and endow them
with whatever I will — provided that I know how to
ask you, and that you permit it

74

The principle of unity which saves our guilty
world, wherein all is in process of returning to dust,
is Christ. Through the force of his magnetism, the
light of his ethical teaching, the unitive power of
his very being, Jesus establishes again at the heart
of the world the harmony of all endeavors and the
convergence of all beings. Let us read the gospel
boldly and we shall see that no idea can better con-
vey to our minds the redemptive function of the
Word than that of a unification of all flesh in one
and the same Spirit.

Jesus clothed his divine personality alike in the
most palpable and in the most inward beauty and
charm of human individuality. He adorned this hu-
manity with the most enchanting and captivating
splendors of the universe. And then he came
amongst us and showed himself to us as that which

154 Hymn of the Universe

we could never have thought to see: the synthesis
of all perfections so that now each man must of ne-
cessity see him and feel his presence, and must ei-
ther hate or love what he sees.

75

Lord God, when I go up to your altar for commun-
ion, grant that I may derive from it a discernment
of the infinite perspectives hidden beneath the
smallness and closeness of the host in which you
are concealed. Already I have accustomed myself
to recognize beneath the inertness of the morsel of
bread a consuming power which, as the greatest
Doctors of your Church have said, far from being
absorbed into me, absorbs me into itself. Help me
now to overcome that remaining illusion which
would make me think of you as touching me only
in a limited and momentary way.

I begin to understand: under the sacramental
species you- touch me first of all through the
"accidents" of matter, of the material bread; but
then, in consequence of this, you touch me also
through the entire universe inasmuch as the entire
universe, thanks to that primary influence, ebbs and
flows over me. In a true sense the arms and the
heart which you open to me are nothing less than
all the united powers of the world which, per-
meated through and through by your will, your in-
clinations, your temperament, bend over my being
to form it and feed it and draw it into the blazing
center of your infinite fire. In the host, Lord Jesus,
you offer me my life*

PensSes 155

76

We who are Christ's disciples must not hesitate to
harness this force — the world's expectancy and fer-
ment and unfolding — which needs us and which
we need. On the contrary, under pain of allowing it
to be dissipated and of perishing ourselves, we
must share in those aspirations, in essence authenti-
cally religious, which make men today so intensely
aware of the immensity of the world, the grandeur
of the mind and the sacred value of every newly
discovered truth. This is the schooling which will
teach our present Christian generation how to
await the future.

We have long been profoundly aware of these
perspectives: the progress of the universe, and
especially the human universe, does not take place
in rivalry with God, nor is it a vain squandering of
the energies we owe to him. The greater man be-
comes and the more humanity becomes one, con-
scious of its power and able to control it, the more
beautiful creation will be, the more perfect adora-
tion will become, and the more Christ will find, for
the mystical extensions of his humanity, a body
worthy of resurrection. The world can no more
have two summits of fulfillment than a circumfer-
ence can have two centers. The star which the
world is awaiting though it does not as yet know its
name, though it cannot as yet appreciate exactly its
transcendence, cannot even distinguish the most
spiritual, the most divine of its rays: this star can-
not be other than that very Christ in whom we
hope. To look with longing to the Parousia of the

156 Hymn of the Universe

Son of Man we have only to allow to beat within
our breasts — and to Christianize — the heart of the
world.

77

Death will not simply throw us back into the great
flux of reality, as the pantheist's picture of beati-
tude would have us believe. Nevertheless in death
we are caught up, overwhelmed, dominated by
that divine power which lies within the forces of
inner disintegration and, above all, within that ir-
resistible yearning which will drive the separated
soul on to complete its further, predestined jour-
ney as infallibly as the sun causes the mists to rise
from the water on which it shines. Death surren-
ders us completely to God; it makes us pass into
God. In return we have to surrender ourselves to
it, in love and in the abandon of love, since, when
death comes to us, there is nothing further for us
to do but let ourselves be entirely dominated and
led onwards by God.

78

Because, Lord, by every innate impulse and
through all the hazards of my life I have been
driven ceaselessly to search for you and to set you
in the heart of the universe of matter, I shall have
the joy, when death comes, of closing my eyes
amidst the splendor of a universal transparency
aglow with fire. . . .

It is as if the fact of bringing together and con-

Pensdes 157

necting the two poles, tangible and intangible, ex-
ternal and internal, of the world which bears us
onwards had caused everything to burst into flames
and set everything free.

In the guise of a tiny baby in its mother's arms,
obeying the great laws of birth and infancy, you
came, Lord Jesus, to dwell in my infant-soul; and
then, as you reenacted in me — and in so doing ex-
tended the range of — your growth through the
Church, that same humanity which once was born
and dwelt in Palestine began now to spread out
gradually everywhere like an iridescence of un-
numbered hues through which, without destroying
anything, your presence penetrated — and endued
with supervitality — every other presence about me.

And all this took place because, in a universe
which was disclosing itself to me as structurally
convergent, you, by right of your resurrection, had
assumed the dominating position of all-inclusive
Center in which everything is gathered together,

79

Your call, my God, as it comes to men has innumer-
able different shades of meaning: each vocation is
essentially different from all the rest.

The various regions, nations, social groupings,
have each their particular apostles.

And I, Lord God, for my (very lowly) part,
would wish to be the apostle — and, if I dare say so,
the evangelist — of your Christ in the universe.

For you gave me the gift of sensing, beneath the
incoherence of the surface, the deep, living unity

158 Hymn of the Universe

which your grace has mercifully thrown over our
heart breaking plurality.

The universality of your divine magnetism, and
the intrinsic value of our human undertakings: this,
my God, is the twofold truth you have shown me,
and I am burning to spread abroad the knowledge
of it and to bring it fully into effect

If you judge me worthy, Lord God, I would
show to those whose lives are dull and drab the
limitless horizons opening out to humble and hid-
den efforts; for these efforts, if pure in intention,
can add to the extension of the incarnate Word a
further element — an element known to Christ's
heart and gathered up into his immortality.

You disclosed to me the essential vocation of the
world: to attain to its completion, through a chosen
part of its whole being, in the plenitude of the in-
carnate Word.

In order to take possession of me, my God, you
who are so much more remote in your immensity
and so much deeper in the intimacy of your in-
dwelling than all things else, you take to yourself
and unite together the immensity of the world and
the intimate depths of my being.

I realize that the totality of all perfections, even
natural perfections, is then necessary basis for that
mystical and ultimate organism which you are con-
structing out of all things. You do not destroy,
Lord, the beings you adopt for your building; but
you transform them while preserving everything
good that the centuries of creation have fashioned
in them.

PensSes 159

The whole world is concentrated and uplifted in
expectancy of union with the divine; yet at the
same time it encounters an insurmountable barrier.
For nothing can come to Christ unless he himself
takes it and gathers it into himself.

Toward Christ all the immortal monads con-
verge. Not a single atom, however lowly or imper-
fect, but must cooperate — at least by way of repul-
sion or reflection — in the fulfillings of Christ

Only sin is excluded from the Pleroma. And even
so, since to be damned is not to be annihilated, who
shall say what mysterious complement might be
given to the body of Christ by that immortal loss?

Through their diminution in Christo Jesu, those
who mortify themselves, who suffer, who bear old
age with patience, cross over the critical threshold
where death is turned into life. Through forgetting
the self they are given to find it, never to lose it
again.

The universe takes on the lineaments of Jesus;
but then there is great mystery: for he who thus be-
comes discernible is Jesus crucified.

Christ is loved as a person; he compels recogni-
tion as a world.

80

Lord Jesus, when it was given me to see where the
dazzling trail on particular beauties and partial
harmonies was leading, I recognized that it was all
coming to center on a single point, a single person:
yourself. Every presence makes me feel that you

160 Hymn of the Universe

are near me; every touch is the touch of your hand;
every necessity transmits to me a pulsation of your
will.

That the Spirit may always shine forth in me,
that I may not succumb to the temptation that lies
in wait for every act of boldness, nor ever forget
that you alone must be sought in and through ev-
erything, you, Lord, will send me — at what mo-
ments only you know — deprivations, disappoint-
ments, sorrow.

What is to be brought about is more than a
simple union: it is a transformation, in the course of
which the only thing our human activity can do is,
humbly, to make ourselves ready, and to accept.

Seeing the mystic immobile, crucified or rapt in
prayer, some may perhaps think that his activity is
in abeyance or has left this earth: they are mis-
taken. Nothing in the world is more intensely alive
and active than purity and prayer, which hang like
an unmoving light between the universe and God.
Through their serene transparency flow the waves
of creative power, charged with natural virtue and
with grace. What else but this is the Virgin Mary?

81

Christian love, Christian charity: I know from ex-
perience how for the most part these words evoke
in non-Christians either a kindly or a malicious in-
credulity. The idea of loving God and the world,
they object, is surely a psychological absurdity.
How is one in fact to love the intangible, the uni-
versal? And then in so far as it can be said more or

PensSes 161

less metaphorically that a love of all and of the All
is possible, is not this inward activity, far from
being specifically Christian, familiar to the mystics
of India or Persia and to many more?

And yet, are not the facts there before our eyes,
physically, almost brutally, to prove the contrary?

In the first place, say what one will, a love, a true
love of God is perfectly possible: were it not, all
the monasteries and all the churches on earth
would be emptied in a moment, and Christianity,
for all its framework of ritual, of precepts, of hier-
archy, would quite inevitably crumble away into
nothingness.

In the second place, this love certainly has in
Christianity a strength which is not found else-
where: otherwise, despite all the virtues and all
the attraction of the tenderness which characterizes
the gospel, the doctrine of the beatitudes and of the
Cross would long since have given place to some
other, more winning, creed — and more particularly
to some form of humanism or belief in purely
earthly values.

Whatever the merits of other religions, it remains
an undeniable fact— explain it how one will — that
the most ardent and most massive blaze of collec-
tive love that has ever appeared in the world burns
here and now in the heart of the Church of God.

SOURCES OF THE PENSEES

The Presence of God
in the World

1. La Vie Cosmique, March 24, 1916 (unpublished),

2. Mon Univers, March 25, 1924 (unpublished). 3.
L 'Apparition de VHomme. 4. Le Milieu Mystique,
1917 (unpublished). 5. Le Milieu Mystique, 1917
(unpublished). 6. La Vision du PassS. 7. La Vision
du PassS. 8. The Phenomenon of Man. 9. Le Milieu
Divin. 10. Le Milieu Divin. 11. Le Milieu Mystique,
1917 (unpublished). 12. The Future of Man. 13.
The Phenomenon of Man. 14. Le Milieu Divin. 15.
Le Milieu Divin. 16. The Future of Man. 17. Le
Milieu Divin. 18. Le Milieu Mystique, 1917 (un-
published). 19. Le Milieu Divin.

Humanity in Progress

20. La Signification et la Valeur constructrices de la
Souffrance/UUmon Catholique des Malades," 1933.

21. La Signification et la Valeur constructrices de la
Souffrance, "L'Union Catholique des Malades," 1933.

22. La Milieu Mystique, 1917 (unpublished). 23. La
Foi qui Opdre, 1918 (unpublished). 24. The Future
of Man. 25. Le Milieu Mystique, 1917 (unpub-

PensSes 163

lished). 26. Notes de Retraites, 1944-55 (unpub-
lished). 27. La Vision du PassS. 28. The Phenom-
enon of Man. 29. The Phenomenon of Man. 30. he
Milieu Divin. 31. The Future of Man. 32. La Vision
du PassS. 33. La Vision du PassS. 34. The Phenom-
enon of Man. 35. The Future of Man. 36. Le Mys-
tique, 1917 (unpublished). 37. Le Milieu Divin.
38. Le Milieu Divin. 39. Le Milieu Divin.

The Meaning of
Human Endeavor

40. Letter to M.T.-C, of November 13, 1916. 41. Le
PrStre, 1918 (unpublished). 42. La Signification et
la Valeur constructrices de la Souffrance, "I/Union
Catholique des Malades," 1933. 43. Le Milieu Mys-
tique, 1917 (unpublished). 44. V Apparition de
L * Homme. 45. Le Milieu Mystique, 1917 (unpub-
lished). 46. La Lutte contre la Multitude, 1917 (un-
published). 47. The Phenomenon of Man. 48. Le
PrStre, 1918 (unpublished). 49. La Lutte contre La
Multitude, 1917 (unpublished). 50. The Phenom-
enon of Man. 51. The Phenomenon of Man. 52. Le
PrStre, 1918 (unpublished). 53. Le Milieu Divin.
54. Le Milieu Divin. 55. Le Milieu Divin. 56. La Foi
qui Opdre, 1918 (unpublished). 57. Le Milieu Divin.

In the Total Christ

58. La Vie Cosmique, March 24, 1916 (unpub-
lished). 59. Letter to M.T.-C, November 23, 1916
(unpublished). 60. Le PrStre, 1$18 (unpublished).
61. Le PrStre, 1918 (unpublished). 62. La Vision du

164 Hymn of the Universe

Passi. 63. La Vision du PassS. 64. La Fox qui Opdre,
1918 (unpublished). 65. Le Coeur de la Matiere,
1950 (unpublished). 66. Le Milieu Divin. 67. Le
Milieu Divin. 68. Le Milieu Divin. 69. Le Milieu
Divin. 70. La Foi qui Opdre, 1918 (unpublished).
71. La Vie Cosmique, March 24, 1916 and The Fu-
ture of Man. 72. The Phenomenon of Man. 73. Le
Pretre, 1918 (unpublished). 74. La Lutte contre la
Multitude, 1917 (unpublished). 75. Le Milieu Divin.
76. Le Milieu Divin. 77. Letter to M.T.-C, Novem-
ber 13, 1916. 78. Le Coeur de la Matidre, 1950 (un-
published). 79. Le PrStre, 1918 (unpublished), pas-
sim. 80. Le Milieu Mystique, 1917 (unpublished),
passim. 81. Le Christique, 1955 (unpublished).